Great course, although the quarter system seriously strips much of its potential IMO. Before I give my critiques, I've give a summary of what this course is all about.

This course requires that you email the Physics & Astronomy department counselor for a PTE before you can enroll. It is very important to note that the coursework is A LOT MORE THAN IT SEEMS---so if your schedule is already packed (4 classes, extracurriculars, jobs, etc.), you are going to run into some trouble!

The whole course consists of 5 biweekly lab activities coving different topics, where you collect data from one lab session and then spend the next week writing a journal-style lab report. In this course, you join a group of 2-4 other people (with similar schedule availabilities as you) and do lab activities with them for the entire quarter. Of course, you have one lecture by the professor giving an introduction to the concepts required for the lab activities, and then two discussions later in the week where you do either lab preparation or data analysis in Jupyter notebook. But outside of that, you and your group must also meet with your TA at the designated building (either at Knudsen or at the telescopes at the roof of the Math-Sciences building) outside of lecture and discussion hours in order to do the lab activities, which take place at either any time during the day (if it is a daytime activity like the Sun and wavefront sensor lab) or at dusk (5:00 pm; if you're doing night observing with the 24-inch telescope at the MS Building roof). Daytime labs can take between 2-3 hours whereas night observing can take between 3-5 hours (ending at 10 pm).

My personal favorite lab activities are the telescope proposal and the night observing ones (Cepheid variable time-series photometry & H-R diagram color photometry of an open cluster). You also do sunspot imaging, solar spectroscopy, and the wavefront sensor lab at the top of Knudsen Hall, which are pretty neat breadth additions to the course (although personally I didn't find them as interesting). Overall the lab activities are very informative and they definitely give you an opportunity to connect with your peers and TAs.

My biggest complaints about this course are the pacing and textbook readings. The quarter system compacts every lab into a single-week rush, so it unfortunately feels more of a nuisance since we do not have time to hone certain skills that one may be unfamiliar with (e.g. scientific writing). I often find myself rushing the lab report writing because of this (FYI though, you get more credit from including essential details like methods, introduction, and journal formatting than simply getting "correct" numbers). The textbook readings (textbooks are free and given in the course!) felt like a slog to go through because they are quite dense and have no relation to lecture and discussion until next week (even then, only a few things from reading are used). Anyways, I really appreciate the willingness of the professor and TA for help, with the frequent discussions, office hours, and email availability.