I'm going to go ahead and ask a stupid question - Are you sure you're focusing correctly? Through an eyepiece, the only way I can see the spider vanes is if I am way out of focus. Do you see the same problem with every eyepiece you have? Can you tell us what eyepieces you are using?
You seem to have missed the inverse part. If the lamp were twice as far away, we would say that it is four times dimmer.
The amount of light that a planet or moon reflects depends on its cross-sectional area and its albedo, or how much light it absorbs. If the Moon and Mars had identical...
The superficial answer to your question is just "Maxwell's Equations," but I think what you're asking is much deeper, akin to "What actually <i>is</i> a magnetic field?" That's tougher to answer.
I prefer Mathematica, because anything you could possibly want to know is in the Help Index. Once you learn how to parse the index (and its examples), you can piece together useful code.
It's true in the full theory that fermions are massless. I Think of QED and QCD as useful approximations where the ugly stuff with the Higgs is stored in the "masses" of the fermions.
I'm involved in MINOS, although I'm relatively new to the experiment. My 'big picture' knowledge of the experiment doesn't go much beyond that press release, but I am currently learning about and doing work on Monte Carlo simulations of the detectors.
Goldstein is very encyclopedic, I would definitely not reccomend it until after you get some preliminary exposure from another source. Goldstein is more appropriate for a graduate course (and is what I used in grad school).
No no, you don't have to be a grad student to understand Lagrangian mechanics. It's typically dealt with in undergraduate classical mechanics. Calc 3 (multivariable) is helpful, though. I'd recommend reading the Feynman's Lectures chapter on the "Principle of Least Action", and then later...
As a graduate of CU-Boulder's physics department, I feel obligated to respond.
What really matters is your understanding of physics. If you feel comfortable with smaller classes, then I would cruise on over to the CU-Boulder physics course website and see if the curriculum is all that...
On the practical side, look for good groupwork/study facilities on-site, access to food and coffee, and also look for things to do on weekends, when you get one.
It depends on the school/program. As a single example, I took a month off of research to study full-time, and the test was administered over three days in blocks of 4 questions. 4 questions in 4 hours on the first day, 8 questions in 8 hours on the second, and 4 questions/hours the third...
I think you are asking how to figure out how much the turret should lead the target, assuming they are traveling in different directions. Is that right?