Schedule

Greetings everyone!  What a great class yesterday, well done.  Please don't forget I will see you all on Thursday 16 October, not this Thursday or Monday.  We seem to have lots of holidays this year.  Also, please do not forget that you have a quiz the next time we meet and your summary of chapter three of whatever book you are reading is due.  We will discuss the book chapters during the last 30 odd minutes of the class.  Study hard and enjoy your time off.

Second week of classes

Greetings everyone!  On Monday I lectured on basic issues needed for the course. These issues included how astronomers measure scale, the units that are used, the seasons on Earth, what defines a year on Earth and other planets, and phases of the moon.  

In lab on Monday we performed a lab on the metric system.  I was very pleased to see you all working so hard and cooperating with each other so well.

Tomorrow we will begin our exploration of how the Solar System formed. This will take a few weeks of lecture.

See you all soon!

Welcome

Greetings everyone!  It was wonderful to meet you all on Monday.  On Monday we reviewed the topics that will be covered in the course, learned about each other, and set the basic rules for the course.  On Thursday we will being our lecture series with a discussion of the basics.  See you all tomorrow!

Fall 2008

Hi everyone!  Soon it will be the start of a new academic year and I am very excited about teaching again. I have had a wonderful year off that was full of many rewarding events and achievements.  I made several trips to the Natural History Museum at the Smithsonian and also to UCLA, but for research projects that I am working on in collaboration with colleagues from these institutions.  I was an invited speaker at a conference in India, which was a really outstanding conference and just an outstanding trip.  I've attached an image of me from a temple within the Elora caves, which are carved into solid rock!  I totally loved India.  I made many other trips and did a lot of data crunching and writing, which I am still doing!  I had an important paper get published in the journal Science!

I have a lot of new ideas for my Introduction to Astronomy course that I am looking forward to implementing in the fall.  However, enrollment is not great and I need at least 5 more students to register for the course!  Please tell all your friends to take my class.  The schedule is a little odd this year since one lecture period and the lab are both on Monday, so it makes for a bit of a long day.  

More in the near future!

Update

Hello everyone,

Because Chaya asked, I am posting some image from my sabbatical. I have spent time at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona and UCLA. In two weeks I will be at the University of Maryland. At all these fine institutions I have and will be performing analyses on meteorites, which as you all know is something I love A life passion you could say. I hope you are all working hard at your studies. Soon it will be Thanksgiving, one of my favorite holidays! In January I will go to India. I have been invited to give a lecture at a conference held by the Physics Research Laboratories. This is going to be some adventure! The one image of all the tv sets is a composite image of live feed from Mars--you can see the crater clearly. Finally, in two weeks I will go to the Kennedy Space Center. My good friend, Dr. Stan Love, is an astronaut and will be launching into space for the first time on the space shuttle Atlantis. How cool is that! More soon!

2007-2008 Year

Hello everyone!

If you are reading this please let all your friends know that I am on sabbatical leave this year. This means that I will not be teaching at Kingsborough for the entire academic year. I will very much miss teaching, however, I really need to concentrate on upgrading my lectures and one some writing! I will try to post some images from my trips during the year.

All the best,

Dr. Connolly

Rain

Hello everyone,

I will drive, or at least try to drive, into Brooklyn soon. I have your exams and I am pretty pleased with the results, job well done.

See you soon.

Dr. Connolly