Astronomy 1022 Lab Manual Changes

During the spring semester of 2022, I became increasing frustrated with the quality and age of the lab manual we had students using. Most of the lab manual was originally written before I was born...

Needless to say, it needed an upgrade.

I took it upon myself to improve on this dated manual. This evolved into a whole new refresh of the entire formatting of the textbook into LaTeX (not to mention ALEX labs -- which can be seen here)

Changes

For a reference (and for my own personal pride), I have compiled visual exmaples of a couple of the biggest changes here.

• Transferred the entire document from Microsoft Word (1997 version) to LaTeX
• Individual labs can be edited separately and compiled together into one lightweight (3.2 MB) pdf file
• Found high quality pdfs/pngs of all existing photographs/historical references in the lab manual
• Recreated any figure that did not fall into the category of photograph or historical reference using Tikz (over 25 total diagrams, see below for examples)
• In addition to this, I created new figures to help with the clarity of the manual
• Created an automatic table of contents and numbering system that updates universally with minimal effort
• Reworked the computer software for three labs (ALEX)
• This included rewriting large chunks of text in the manual as well as reworking the conceptual elements of the labs
• Clarified directions by editing text in nearly every single experiment
• Replaced he/she pronouns in reference to the instructor with they/them
• Unified the style of the entire manual
• Created answer keys in the form of an instructor version of the lab manual
• Created LaTeX document class and package to handle this under the hood
• Helped create rubrics for each worksheet, so that grading of the labs in the future is more consistent and can be handed off to other TAs