How the Practical Course works
- The course supervisor organizes the students into teams of two to three people.
- Each team has to take six experiments.
- Each experiment is done on two afternoons, starting on a Tuesday at 13:30.
- The experiments are assigned to the teams, they cannot be chosen by the team members.
- Who is doing which experiment is announced in time on the black board in the Observatory lobby and on the internet.
- All members of each team must be present on each of the afternoons physically and mentally.
If you have to be absent due to illness, please inform your lab supervisor on time (via e-mail, phone) and hand in a medical certificate if necessary.
If only one person from your team is ill this does not mean the date will be shifted for the other members as well! The supervisor will
make another appointment with the missing student.
- Further announcements, i.e. concerning the evaluation scheme, will be talked about in the briefing and can be found on the internet.
- If capacity allows, each group will have the opportunity to go observing.
Observations take place on Mount Wendelstein. This requires that the students be motivated and are ready to coordinate with their supervisors. You will need some additional time for getting to and from the mountain. Also, students should be flexible regarding times (due to weather and cable car issues).
How to organize your Wendelstein observations:
You will get an information sheet with e-mail addresses and phone numbers of the supervisors for Wendelstein observations at the beginning of the semester.
One of the students calls the supervisors and the other team members when the weather forecast is favorable and all team members are able to take part (this is your responsibility!!).
If you didn't observe in time, you will get old data for doing the analysis or will have to do different experiments.
How to get to and from Mount Wendelstein is your responsibility. Your supervisors will explain to you how to get a cable car ticket, these tickets will be payed for by the observatory. You will have to take the cable cat at 14:15 (in summer you can take a later one, please speak to your supervisors about this).
Please arrive at Mount Wendelstein well-fed and with some food for a nightly Brotzeit after observations and for breakfast. No cigarettes and alcohol are allowed at the observatory, so please leave them at home.
For legal reasons, each participant has to agree to sleep at least for 6 hours before driving back to Munich (to prevent fatigue). This implies that you might also miss a lecture on the day after the observations. Due to the possibility of extreme weather conditions, it can happen that cable cars do not operate for a day. On this rare occasion, you would have to stay another night at the WST, eating something at the restaurant there.
You can find the web pages on
In case of further questions, please write an e-mail to
Dr. Stella Seitz
Universitäts-Sternwarte München
Scheinerstraße 1 D-81679 München
Zimmer I-03
Tel. 0049/89/21805996
Fax. 0049/89/21806003
e-mail: stella@usm.uni-muenchen.de