Whittle ASTR 5630 & 5640

GRADUATE EXTRAGALACTIC ASTRONOMY

How to use this web site

For the most part, using these notes should be pretty straightforward. Here are one or two things to help you find your way around.

The 20 Topics

There are 20 topics, which you can think of chapters in a book, i.e. they each have:

text - the primary material
figures and diagrams, including some outside links
references (some external) and suggested readings
homework questions
an index of sub-topics

The topics are grouped into 4 major divisions, and progress roughly as: local/normal to active/cosmological. Together, they cover essentially all of contemporary extragalactic astronomy and cosmology. For a 2 semester course, the topics divide naturally as 1-10 and 11-20 (roughly 26 lectures each semester).

Frames and Windows

I intend you to use three frames divided between two windows

The Main Frame : is where you'll be reading the notes for each topic. Almost always, hyperlinks to the notes will place them in this Main frame.

Also appearing in this window frame are several useful "nodes", loaded using several "buttons" :

Home Page : has several primary links, mainly to the other three nodes.

Main Outline : lists all 20 Topics & links to indexes, notes, figures, homework, & references.

Full Index : concatenates indexes from all 20 topics.

Toolbox : basic astronomical data gathered and placed in the image window

The Navigation Frame : is initially allocated 25% of the main window, on the left, though you can change that if you need more space for the notes. Its primary use is to display the hypertexted index to any topic, which loads in to Main frame. In addition it can list and link to all the Questions & References, which are loaded into the Image window (see below). The only index which does not get placed in the Navigation frame is the "Full Index" (see above) which is loaded into the Main frame.
The Image Window : is where many other things are shown (images, references, homework). This helps you keep your place in the notes (Main frame) while looking at related materials. Hyperlinks to images or references in the notes send them to the Image window. This is particularly useful since once loaded, you can move back and forth through former images. If you are lucky enough to have a two-screen computer, it is ideal to put the image and main windows in each screen. You can open the image window now by clicking [here].

With a little resizing and placement, it is easy to have quick access to all three frames.

Topic Notes & Further Developments

The button bar at the top of each topic loads the various additional materials into the Image Window, although the "Print" button links to a printable (pdf) version of the notes. Within the text, hyperlinks are in [red] (blue hover) which load in the Image window, unless the link is to elsewhere in the Notes in which case the Main frame simply skips to the new location in the notes. External (outside) links are labelled o-link and direct the new link to the Image window.

Depending on your prior knowledge of each topic, the notes may seem either sufficient in isolation, or to be used along side the suggested readings. To help with comprehension and assimilation of the material, I plan to include many more Homework Questions (HQ) as well as frequent "Quick Questions" (QQ) sprinkled liberally throughout the notes.

Although the project is well underway, it is still far from complete. In addition to the pedagogical developments (Quick & Homework Questions, and topic completion: 10, 17-20, and parts of 9, & 15) other enhancements include: (a) adding many more Figures; (b) documenting the source material more thoroughly, as well as adding many more references & targetted readings; (c) adding a "Toolbox" page which gathers the kind of quantitative information one frequently needs, either as a student for problem solving, or as a researcher for any number of applications.

	Home Page : has several primary links, mainly to the other three nodes.
	Main Outline : lists all 20 Topics & links to indexes, notes, figures, homework, & references.
	Full Index : concatenates indexes from all 20 topics.
	Toolbox : basic astronomical data gathered and placed in the image window