Introductory Topics in Astronomy: Planets and Telescopes

Part of the Open Astrophysics Bookshelf. A pdf of these notes is available at this link.

These notes were written while teaching (and revamping) a one-semester introductory astronomy course, "Planets and Telescopes" at Michigan State University. The background required was an introductory calculus sequence and first-year physics. The reason for the odd juxtaposition of topics—planets and telescope—is that the course was created from the merger of two undergraduate courses, one of which was a laboratory course with observing done at the campus observatory.

These notes were meant to supplement the course's main texts, Ryden and Peterson, Foundations of Astrophysics, and Taylor, An Introduction to Error Analysis. The text layout uses the tufte-book LaTeX class: the main feature is a large right margin in which the students can take notes; this margin also holds small figures and sidenotes. Exercises are embedded throughout the text. These range from reading exercises to longer, more challenging problems. Because the exercises are spread throughout the text, there is a "List of Exercises" in the front matter to help with looking for specific problems. There are further notes and exercises on statistics in the form of Jupyter notebooks in the folder statistics/notebooks.

Because the course structure is idiosyncratic to Michigan State University, I've also added the chapters as individual handouts (files *-handout.tex). These can be rebuilt by running python make-handouts.py; you may need to adjust by hand the placement of figures.

License

Except where explicitly noted, this work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.

Requirements for installing

0. Either pdfLaTeX or XeLaTeX.
1. tufte-book LaTeX class
2. The starType macros. You can install this from the source; alternatively, a shell script install_local_starType is provided to automatically fetch the macros into the directory of this package.
3. The wasysym package is used to generate astronomical symbols.
4. An up-to-date version (5.8 or later) of the fontawesome5 LaTeX class; if you are using XeLaTeX, you will need to install the fontawesome otf glyphs as well. (Alternatively, you can redefine the \notebook command, defined in planets-notes.tex and in handout script make-handouts.py, to a standard LaTeX symbol.)
5. If you process the document with XeLaTeX, you will need either the TeX Gyre font family or the fonts Chaparral Pro, Source Code Pro, and Raleway Medium.

To build

1. For a default installation, simply make. This will build the document using pdfLaTeX.

2. The default TeX engine is pdfLaTeX; if you wish to use XeLaTeX, change line 2 of the makefile to read COMPILE=xelatex. In this case you will need to have the TeX Gyre fonts installed. You may also need to modify the latex class file tufte-common.def so that fontspec is loaded with the correct options. A patch file, tufte-patch, is included. To use, patch /path/to/tufte-common.def tufte-patch (you may need to run this using sudo).

   1. If you have Chaparral Pro, Source Code Pro, and Raleway Medium fonts available, add the option profonts to the \documentclass directive in AST208-notes.tex.
   2. If you wish to use the STIX fonts for greek letters, add the option stix to the \documentclass directive in AST208-notes.tex.

3. To build the handouts, at the command line type make handouts.