David Steele University of Wisconsin - Madison Department of Physics 1150 University Avenue Madison, Wisconsin 53706 USA steele@alizarin.physics.wisc.edu

Jodi Cooley, Francis Halzen, Jim Madsen, Kath Rawlins, and I taught an AMANDA outreach workshop August 2-10 at UW-River Falls as part of the UWRF Master's in Science Education program. The course was supported by KTI, or K-Thru-Infinity , a program sponsored by the UW-Madison Graduate School Professional Development Office and NSF.

And here is a link to my afternoon activity on AMANDA data analysis

Jodi, Kath and David are also writing montly Astronomy in the Ice Newsletters. If you were at the course, you should be receiving a hardcopy in the mail each month. Here, you can find the online edition and all of the previous issues.

Scientific Notation & Large Numbers

• Order of magnitude (pdf)
• Log scales (pdf)

Estimation

• How many jelly beans? (pdf)
• Why is this important? (pdf)
• How to estimate (pdf) (with example: How Many Piano Tuners are there in Madison? (pdf))

Relativity (pdf)

Scales of the Universe

• Units (pdf)
• Unit prefixes (pdf)
• Distance scales (pdf)
• Times Scales
• Energy scales (pdf)
• Population of the galaxy and universe
• The Local Group (jpg)
• Virgo Cluster (jpg)
• Supercluster (jpg)
• Hubble deep field (jpg) Note: better copies of this picture can be found at the link at the bottom of the page.
• Activity: When galaxies collide

Multiwavelength Astronomy

• optical
• Here is an example of the limitations of optical astronomy: a dark nebula (jpg)
• infrared (jpg)
• radio
• neutrinos

Cosmology

• Redshift, Expansion, & Hubble's constant

Overview (jpg)

Star Formation (pdf)

Evolution of Smaller Stars (pdf)

• Red giants
• Planetary Nebulae
• White dwarfs

Evolution of Larger Stars (pdf)

• Red supergiants
• Heavy element production
• Supernovae (1987A) (jpg)
• Neutron Stars (pdf)
• Pulsars (pdf)
• Crab Nebula (jpg)
• Black Holes (pdf)

• Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN)
• Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs)

• Pasachoff. Astronomy, 1995. This is the textbook I used as a freshman in college. Lot's of pictures and information without heavy use of equations.
• Heidmann. Extragalactic Adventure,1982. This book is a little older (and outdated in some places), but it has good, succinct introductory material on modern cosmological topics including large scale structure, general relativity, and curved space.
• Morrinson. Powers of Ten, 1982. Based on the film, this book takes you out in powers of ten to the largest scales in the universe and in by powers of ten down to the scale of a quark. See also the following related websites:
  • http://www.powersof10.com/
  • http://www.wordwizz.com/pwrsof10.htm
• Hubble Space Telescope pictures. http://heritage.stsci.edu