Lecture Tutorials for Introductory Astronomy

Funded by the National Science Foundation, Lecture-Tutorials for Introductory Astronomy is designed to help make large lecture-format courses more interactive with easy-to-implement student activities that can be integrated into existing course structures. The Second Edition of the Lecture-Tutorials for Introductory Astronomy contains nine new activities that focus on planetary science, system related topics, and the interactions of Light and matter. These new activities have been created using the same rigorous class-test development  process that was used for the highly successful first edition. Each of the 38 Lecture-Tutorials, presented in a classroom-ready format, challenges students with a series of carefully designed questions that spark classroom discussion, engage students in critical reasoning, and require no equipment.

The Night Sky: Position, Motion, Seasonal Stars, Solar vs. Sidereal Day, Ecliptic, Star Charts. Fundamentals of Astronomy: Kepler’s 2^nd Law, Kepler’s 3^rd Law, Newton’s Laws and Gravity, Apparent and Absolute Magnitudes of Stars, The Parse, Parallax and Distance, Spectroscopic Parallax.  Nature of Light in Astronomy: The Electromagnetic (EM) Spectrum of Light, Telescopes and Earth’s Atmosphere, Luminosity, Temperature and Size, Blackbody Radiation, Types of Spectra, Light and Atoms, Analyzing Spectra, Doppler Shift. Our Solar System: The Cause of Moon Phases, Predicting Moon Phases, Path of Sun, Seasons, Observing Retrograde Motion, Earth’s Changing Surface, Temperature and Formation of Our Solar System, Sun Size. Stars Galaxies and Beyond: H-R Diagram, Star Formation and Lifetimes, Binary Stars, The Motion of Extrasolar Planets, Stellar Evolution, Milky Way Scales, Galaxy Classification, Looking at Distant Objects, Expansion of the Universe.  For all readers interested in astronomy.