ASTR 2110

Useful and essential class for Astronomy majors. Prof. Sarazin is a good, responsive professor, but in terms of actual grades, the Class TA definitely helped out more. Tests and most of homework can be completed without looking at the textbook.

Unless you need to take this class, please don't. Professor Sarazin clearly thinks that we all love star stuff as much as he does...we don't. I'm here for a tech elective to graduate, and that's it.

His homeworks are wildly inconsistent from what he teaches in class. His class lectures will be 50 minutes about how Brahe charted some star across the years, and then the homework will ask you to transform ellipses from different coordinate systems using equations with two different centers. I do more math in this class than in my actual math class. The derivations expected of us are ridiculous, especially given the pre-requisites for the course and what he teaches (or more appropriately, doesn't teach). He will go over equations in class for twenty minutes, then tell us we'll never use them, and continue not teaching us what we actually need. I have never seen him work out an example in class, despite these types of problems being entirely what he asks on homework.

Now, there is a review session where the TA helps you with homework. However, these are hit or miss as to whether they are actually helpful, and they are FRIDAYS AT 3 PM!!!!! This is almost the single worst time that Professor Sarazin could have selected.

I will say that he peppers his lectures with humor, which almost makes up for the slides being less than descriptive (I can't study off of them later, there's barely any info). I will also say that the tests are quite fair, mixing qualitative concepts learned in class and problems from the homework. So if you study the homework solutions and study his slides you *should* be okay.

Oh, and the textbook we used was trash. Had formulas, no worked out examples, the index was incomplete, especially if you're trying to find something like the equation for degeneracy pressure. Seriously, it's honestly not worth the money.

The worst thing I can say about this class is that it made me unsubscribe from the space subreddit. I don't want to see anything about stars or planets ever again.

Sarazin tries to make his lectures interesting by putting in some dry jokes here and there. He grades really tough but is pretty helpful during office hours.

Sarazin is a very insightful professor and his enthusiasm makes the lectures interesting. The course overall lays a great foundation in the astronomy and the basic physics involved. He thoroughly enjoys telling a few jokes during lecture which most are very quirky but that fact in itself makes it funny. The homework heavily varies in difficulty from week to week but the review session (an optional HW concept review and help session) makes even the most difficult problems doable. Sarazin, in my opinion, is at his best during his office hours but very few, if any, people go to them, so if you have questions, I highly recommend visiting his office. The exams, for some, are difficult but the computational problems are pretty much pulled directly from homeworks. Just learn the few formulas used there and it is not too hard to do well in the course.

This was a great class for an intro to astrophysics. Professor Sarazin was very insightful and kept the class interesting with his random little jokes and such. I would definitely recommend taking this class.

Sarazin has a great deal of knowledge in the field of astronomy. My favorite part about this class was asking him random questions to try to induce one of his tangents. There is a fair amount of physics involved in the course, but if you go to the discussion (which is actually an optional homework help session) then the homeworks aren't that bad. The exams were relatively difficult but it's not too hard to do well in the class overall.