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The total undergraduate enrollment in our Astronomy classes is close to a thousand students per semester. Roughly 30% of UK graduates will have taken an astronomy course before they graduate. Although most of these students are in our introductory level survey courses, the Department also has an active undergraduate Physics major, and some of these students have an interest in astronomy. All of these students will be served by the Observatory. Observing sessions will be held on a regular basis and students in the large survey courses will be encouraged to participate. They could then see the phenomena they have studied in class. This will provide an intimacy and directness that looking at pictures in books cannot provide. UK's William Lipscomb, who won the 1976 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, says that his experiences at UK's second observatory during the 1930s sparked his first interest in physics and chemistry. A PDF of his letter is here. Physics majors with an interest in astronomy will benefit as well. There are a wide range of experiments and observations that can be done by equipping the telescope with a CCD camera and spectrometer. A telescope with a CCD can make observations that required the largest telescopes in the world a few decades ago. For example, students could measure the speed of light and the mass of Jupiter by observing the motions of its moon, and determine the chemical composition of stars from their spectra. |
Copyright 2001-2006 Gary J. Ferland
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