Difference: SDSU680 ( vs. 1)

The lecture slides contain "answers" to questions that I ask the students to work through in class, so please do not post these anywhere a student might get hold of them.

For my lectures, I decided to use ipython notebooks instead of powerpoint, etc. The lectures have a number of code demos in them, so this worked out pretty well. During each class I would show a version of the lecture with key code missing from the slides. Then I could either type it in live or ask the students to figure out how to do it (in groups or individually) as we went along.

The assignments include a midterm project (measuring parallax using PTF data). Homework #8 is really a second project (estimating the distance to M31 using PTF data). The final project (using SNIa to measure the Hubble Constant) is also included. Obviously I ended up going with a distance ladder theme this time, which I think was fun for the students. Again, these assignment are all given in ipython (jupyter) notebooks.

The course was taught using Python 3. I made frequent used of the astropy package.

If you have any comments to improve the course, please let me know!

-- RobertQuimby - 23 Feb 2017

• astro.techniques.tgz: gzipped tarball with the lectures and assignments.