ASTR 620
Galaxies

Fall 2007
MW 2:00-3:15 PM
CSS 0201
Prof. Stacy McGaugh
Office: CSS 1251
ssm -at- astro

Textbooks
Galactic Astronomy
Binney & Merrifield
Errata
Galactic Dynamics
Binney & Tremaine
Errata


Course News

Final Exam statistics --- Median: 63 | High Score: 79 | Low Score: 52 (80 points possible)

Thanks to everyone for making this an interesting and stimulating semester.

Course Links
Course Outline
Course Work | HW 1 | HW 2 | HW 3 | HW 4
Topics for semseter projects.

Topical Links
Cool spectrum
Galaxy Crash JavaLab by Chris Mihos. Try playing with friction & halo size.
Surface of Section JavaLab by Chris Mihos.
Nice discussion of Gravitational Potentials by Josh Barnes.
Overview of Galaxy Classification by Greg Bothun.
Nice pictures of the gas in spiral galaxies as well as the stars (towards bottom of Oosterloo's page).
Concise facts about Astronomical magnitude systems.
Movie of stars orbiting the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.
Images of Local Group Galaxies.
Info on the Sagittarius Dwarf.
M31 group images from NED. Note the effects of resolution!

Useful Links
NASA's ADS (Astrophysical Data System), an excellent way to search the literature.
astro-ph e-print archive. Most astronomy papers appear here first as preprints. Caveat Emptor - most papers posted here have not yet been refereed.
e-Journals: ApJ | AJ | MNRAS | A&A | PASP
Level 5, an Extragalactic Kowledgebase at NED.

Merging galaxy simulation created for the IMAX movie Cosmic Voyage.
Warning - this is a rather large (24 Mb) MPEG movie. It may require excessive down load time.
Courtesy of Chris Mihos (CWRU).

Check out the Mihos JavaLab.
Note: most of the Applets perform better on the PCs than on the SUNs.