Comets are occasional visitors from the icy reaches of the outer Solar
System. This lecture discusses the orbits, structure, and properties of
comets, and introduces the "dirty snowball" model of a comet nucleus.
The end of class was a demo where I created a model of a comet nucleus
from common household and office materials. Imagine a twisted
combination of Alton Brown and Emeril Lagasse with a PhD in Astrophysics
and you get the idea. We were not able to arrange for a videographer to
come, but we did get some stills before the batteries died on the
digital camera. The pictures are on the lecture webpage. The lecture
is slightly abbreviated because we did the student evaluation of
instruction surveys before class started. Recorded 2006 Nov 29 in 100
Stillman Hall on the Columbus campus of The Ohio State University.