Lecture 1 Overall Perspective: Hubble Space Telescope, Units, Cosmic Zoom.
Lecture 2 Overall Perspective: A Brief History in Time.
Lecture 3 From Earth's Perspective: Celestial Coordinates, Precession of the Equinoxes, Astrology?
Lecture 4 From Earth's Perspective: Motion of Stars, Sun, and Planets in the sky.
Lecture 5 From Earth's Perspective: Lunar motion and History of Astronomy
Lecture 6 From the Sun's Perspective: Aristarchus, Occam’s Razor, The Copernican Theory, Giordano Bruno, Brahe & Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion.
Lecture 7 From Sun's Perspective: Galileo and his discoveries--inertial motion, gravity, relative motion, support for sun-centered system, & observations.
Lecture 8 Newton's Discoveries: 3 Laws of Motion, Law of Gravity, Reflecting Telescope, and applications.
Lecture 9 Einstein's Special Relativity: postulates and extaordinary consequences--Time dilation, Lorentz contraction, E = mc^2, etc...
Lecture 10 General Relativity--a Theory of Gravity: ingredients, applications, and proof.
Lecture 11 Light: wave characteristics, spectra, Doppler Effect, r^2 Law of Light
Lecture 12 Optics and Telescopes: reflection, refraction, mirrors, lenses, telescope types, powers, and seeing.
Lecture 13 Solar system intro: Earth-Moon system, Eclipses.
Lecture 14 The Moon: Origin and Features.
Lecture 15 The Earth: Origin and Features
Lecture 16 The Solar System: Nebular Theory of Formation, Bode's Law, and science of Planetology
Lecture 17 Mercury
Lecture 18 Venus
Lecture 19 Mars
Lecture 20 Jupiter and its Moons
Lecture 21 Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, and their moons.
Lecture 22 Solar System Debris: asteroids, comets, and meteors.
Lecture 23 The Sun: features, fusion, & solar cycle.
Lecture 24 Star Characteristics: distance, luminosity, and size.
Lecture 25 Star classifications, Herzsprung-Russell Diagram and Life-Track, Multiple Star Systems
Lecture 26 Variable Stars (Cepheids), Interstellar Medium, Stellar Velocity
Lecture 27 The Lives of Stars: Protostar, Birth, Main Sequence, Giant, Last Gasp--planetary nebula or supernova, Death--White Dwarf, Neutron Star, Black Hole.
Lecture 28 Black Holes: characteristics and discoveries, wormholes, white holes, stellar clusters.
Lecture 29 Galactocentric Perspective: The Milky Way, its characteristics and structure, origin?
Lecture 30 Galaxy charactistics and Classes, Dark Matter and Energy, Hubble's Law, Your Cosmic Address--clusters and superclusters.
Lecture 31 Galactic Evolution: Quasars, Active and Radio Galaxies, and the role of supermassive black (& white?) holes.
Lecture 32 Cosmology: Terminology, Pre 1998 Cosmology, Inflationary Theory
Lecture 33
Post 1998 Cosmology: The Cosmological Constant, Dark Energy, and the Accelerating Universe
Closing Lecture
The Forgotten: unique points of view in Astronomy and Physics that were neglected.
Astronomy SYLLABUS
HOMEWORK--I, II, and III
Course Notes FOR DOWNLOADING
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