These notes were written by Ed Brown while teaching a graduate-level astronomy course on stars at Michigan State University.

The course notes were originally meant as a supplement to the main text, Hansen et al.; in some editions of the course I also drew from Clayton and Kippenhahn and Weigert. These notes therefore tend to expand upon topics not already covered there. In the second half of the course, the students typically gave presentations on current topics in stellar evolution, and I supplemented those with readings from the MESA instrument papers. As a result, however, my notes on topics of stellar evolution have lagged behind the rest of the text and are not yet ready for posting.

Some of the material was inspired by three courses at UC-Berkeley in the mid-90’s: “Stars with Lars”, taught by Professor L. Bildsten; Statistical Physics, taught by Professor E. Commins, and Fluid Mechanics, taught by Professor J. Graham. I am also indebted to the students who took the MSU stellar physics course for their questions, feedback, and encouragement. Additional thanks go to MSU graduate students Dana Koeppe and Wei Jia Ong for reading late stages of the drafts and testing the numerical exercises.