Astronomy 162: Introduction to Astronomy

One of the means of obtaining extra credit in this class is by making a student homepage on astronomy. This is not only useful for extra credit; it is an increasingly valuable skill to acquire for your general education. Posting Your Page If you want to put a web site on the UT system, you can do so on unix.cas.utk.edu, where all students are able to set up an account. You need to make a directory called public_html in your home directory there. This directory can be viewed publicly at the address http://web.utk.edu/~userid, where userid is your user-id on this system. However, you don't have to put the website on the UT system if you have a more convenient place to put it. It just needs to be accessible at a valid web address so that I can see it. If you need more assistance in getting started, you can check with your teaching assistant or with me. There is an extensive tutorial on the Web for the basics of how to use the Web in education at It will tell you everything that you could want to know both at the beginning and more advanced level about how to put things on homepages. Although this site is intended for K-12 educators, it is in fact used extensively at the university level as well. If you try to do fancier things like putting in tables or graphs, there are some tools in Online Journey through Astronomy (OJTA) that can be useful. On the splash pages that show the list of chapters for OJTA there is a toolbar (the symbol is a hammer). Open that toolbar and you will find an HTML tablemaker and a Plotter that can be used to produce tables or plots for a web page. Grading Web sites will be graded on quality, information content, and originality, with the maximum grade equivalent to approximately one-half grade of extra credit. The highest grades will go to sites that are original and that show more thought that just throwing a few pictures together. The best sites are those that convey useful astronomy information and are interesting---that is, the kind of site that another student would be interested in looking at to learn something about astronomy. Do not get someone else to do the site for you. I reserve the right to question any particular student about how the site was constructed if I suspect that it was created by someone else for the student. You may get technical help and advice, but the work must finally be your original work. Simply copying another site is unacceptable, and may result in the normal penalties for plagiarism, including possible expulsion from the university. Posting to the Discussion Group A web site is useful only if other people can find it. Once you have made a web site, you should post its location to the Discussion Group. There is a place in the form where you can enter its address, so that a link will appear in your posting. A site will be graded only if its address has been posted to the discussion group to make it public.

Astronomy 162

Department of Physics

University of Tennessee