Text: Practical Astronomy with Your Calculator

• Sections: 53-55, 57-58, 60
• See the homework problems and in-class notes related to the sections listed above.
• Homework 10 Solutions

Text: Stars and Planets

Chapter 9 - Finding the Planets

• What is meant by "transit"?
• Inner Planets
  • Superior Conjunction
  • Inferior Conjunction
  • Greatest Eastern Elongation
  • Greatest Western Elongation
• Outer Planets
• Conjunction
• Opposition
• Quadrature
• What is direct motion for a planet?
• What is meant by retrograde motion
• Kepler’s First Law: The orbit of a planet about the Sun is an ellipse with the Sun at one focus.
• Kepler’s Second Law: A line joining a planet and the Sun sweeps out equal areas in equal intervals of time.
• Kepler’s Third Law: The square of a planet’s sidereal period is proportional to the cube of the length of its orbit’s semimajor axis.
  • Or simply…T² = a³/M if T is measured in years, and a is measured in astronomical units, and M is measured in solar masses.
• Other Key Ideas
  • elliptical orbits
  • focus
  • semimajor axis
  • astronomical unit
• What is Bode's Law? (This is not in the book. Look it up in the homework or online and memorize it.)
• Homework 9 Solutions

Chapter 10 - Observing the Planets

• Jupiter
  • belts and zones, the Great Red Spot and cyclones, occultations, Galilean Satellites: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto
• Saturn
  • rings, Cassini Division, the host with the most moons (22), Met Dr. Thip?
• Venus
  • lava domes and shield volcanoes, phases of Venus, the brightest planet seen from Earth, greenhouse effect
• Mars
  • water channels, ice caps, permafrost, Olympus Mons, Phobos and Demos
• Mercury
  • no atmosphere, difficult to view from Earth
• Uranus
  • first planet in history to be discovered, axis of rotation lies in the plane of its orbit, stellar occultation
• Neptune
  • existence was predicted before it was discovered, Great Dark Spot, Triton
• Pluto and Charon
  • a planet pair, synchronous rotation
• Homework 9 Solutions