Reading, viewing and this week's vocabulary words

Before the next class session, be sure you read Chapter 1, with particular attention to Section 1.3. Reading is Fundamental! Especially for this class with our emphasis on active, collaborative learning over traditional lectures. We're putting off telescopes and optics until Monday to favor depth of learning over breadth of material covered. Blog posts due next Tuesday should focus on problems 1-4 on the Worksheet. Problems 5-7 will be the focus of the following week's blog posts.

You can find supplemental reading on the celestial sphere at Sky & Telescope. Here's another helpful video:



Here's a list of key vocabulary words:

Zenith
Meridian
Elevation
Azimuth
Right ascension
Declination
Hour angle
Latitude (on the Earth, and its relation to declination)
Longitude (on the Earth, and its relation to right ascension)

The goal of this week is for you, the student, to be able to tell me if a star at a given right ascension and declination is observable tonight (irrespective of clouds!). In other words, is a given RA overhead at night at this time of year? Here's a practice problem:

The star HD209458 has a transiting planet. In fact, it was the first transiting planet ever detected by Earthlings, by Harvard's own Prof. David Charbonneau and collaborators way back in 1999 (Charbonneau et al. 2000. See also Henry et al. 2000). If it were clear tonight (not likely, but play along), could we observe this star tonight (Feb 5, 2014) with the Clay telescope on the roof of the Science Center? HD209458 is at RA$ \approx 22$ hours, and a declination of about +19 degrees.