These notes were hand-written on a tablet to preserve the reading experience and sketching freedom of traditional 'pen and paper' notes while providing the benefits of PDFs that can be preserved and transported electronically. They are based on my understanding and re-expression of content drawn from Chs. 2, 3, 4, and 7 of Radiative Transfer in Stellar Atmospheres by R. J. Rutten and Chs. 8 and 9 of The Observation and Analysis of Stellar Photospheres, 3rd Ed. by D.F. Gray, and have been refined over the course of running the course eight times. The author believes that all images credited to other sources were adopted from the public domain.
The order in which ideas are introduced early in the notes reflects the need to quickly familiarize students with the standard inputs and outputs of a stellar atmosphere and spectrum synthesis code so that they can begin doing practical homework assignments with the ChromaStarPy code right away. The scope reflects that ASTR 5410 is a one-semester course, and the approach reflects that it is a core course that emphasizes the underlying physics as applicable to a range of astrophysical objects and phenomena.
The lengths of the PDFs range from just a few pages to almost 30 and reflect the peculiarities of the author's workflow at least as much as the intrinsic divisions in the content.