These will be updated as we progress in the course.

Overall Course

• Astronomy Picture of the Day
• Stellarium -- free planetarium-like software for Mac OS, Windows, or Linux
• Google Sky -- like Google Maps, but looking up
• Celestia -- free space views software for Mac OS, Windows, or Linux
• Heavens Above -- see when bright satellites, etc. are passing overhead

• Public observing nights at the Schommer Observatory (on the roof of Serin) take place on the 2nd and 4th Thursdays of each month, weather permitting.
• space.com -- good, all-around news about space and astronomy

Chapter 1: Our Place in the Universe

• The relative distance of the nearest star on the 1-10 billion scale
• Zooming out 26 orders of magnitude

Chapter 2: Seasons, Constellations, Eclipses

• Oblique and direct flashlights
• Varying angle of sunlight throughout the year
• The reason for the seasons
• Harvard students' misconceptions about seasons

• Daily motion of the local sky
• The Sun's apparent path through the zodiac
• Precession of the Earth's axis

• Simulating phases of the Moon
• Phases of the Moon
• Moon rotates once per orbit

• Lunar eclipses
• Evolution of a total solar eclipse
• Annular vs. total solar eclipses
• Geometry of eclipses
• The ecliptic plane
• Moon's orbit is tilted relative to the ecliptic plane
• Eclipses occur only at nodes of Moon's orbit, where the Moon's orbital plane crosses the ecliptic plane

Chapter 3: Planetary Motion

• Retrograde motion of Mars
• Ptolemaic (geocentric) model for retrograde motion
• Drawing an ellipse
• Ellipses: eccentricity and semimajor axis
• Kepler's 2nd Law: equal areas in equal times
• Kepler's 3rd Law: orbital period vs. distance from Sun
• Phases of Venus

• Orbit trajectories around the Earth
• Galileo's experiment on the Moon

The Nature of Light

• Anatomy of a wave
• Visible light waves
• The electromagnetic spectrum: frequency and wavelength
• The electromagnetic spectrum: examples
• Different kinds of spectra
• Thermal emission at different temperatures
• Fingerprint identification of mystery gases
• Doppler shift of hydrogen lines

Chapter 8: The Sun and Stars

• Mass of helium compared to hydrogen
• Controlled fusion in the Sun, with a "thermostat"
• Active regions in the Sun at different wavelengths
• The Sun as seen with high energy photons

• Stellar populations in an image
• Doppler shift of hydrogen lines
• Doppler shift in a spectroscopic binary star
• Eclipsing binary star
• Binary star movies from Prof. R. Pogge, Ohio State
• Parallax effect for a nearby star
• Parallax effect as a function of distance
• Generate an H-R diagram
• Properties of main sequence stars on the H-R diagram
• Mass of main sequence stars on the H-R diagram

Chapter 9: Star Lives and Deaths

• Multiwavelength molecular cloud with embedded stars
• Cloud collapse simulation
• Multiwavelength Orion Nebula
• Controlled fusion in the Sun, with a "thermostat"
• Main sequence lifetime versus mass
• Death sequence of a low-mass star
• View of the Sun after the main sequence

• Death sequence of a high-mass star
• High-mass stars on the H-R diagram
• Crab nebula (supernova remnant) multiwavelength view
• Star cluster evolution on the H-R diagram
• Star cluster ages from the H-R diagram

Chapter 10: Endpoints of Stellar Evolution

• Conservation of angular momentum
• Escape velocity as a function of radius
• Schwarzschild radius
• Spacetime curvature
• Time slows down near a black hole

Chapter 11: Galaxies

• Structure of the Milky Way
• Edge-on vs. face-on spiral galaxy
• Star-Gas-Star cycle
• Multiwavelength Milky Way
• Orion Nebula fly through
• M51 spiral arms
• Spiral arm patterns
• Spiral galaxy formation
• Spiral arms are like traffic jams
• Seeding spiral arms
  
• Zoom into the center of the Milky Way

• Spiral vs. elliptical galaxy formation
• Colliding galaxies
• Merging galaxies movies
• Merging galaxies: simulations and observations
• M87 with active galactic nucleus

Chapter 12: Cosmic Distances and Expansion of the Universe

• Cosmic distance scale
• Distance methods summary
• Radar pulses in the solar system
• Introduction to parallax
• Parallax of a nearby star
• Measuring parallax
• Parallax and distance
• Stars: brightness, luminosity, and distance
• Star flux and distance
• Main-sequence fitting to measure distances
• Cepheids as standard candles
• White-dwarf supernovae as standard candles

• Discover Hubble's law
• Relationship between distance and velocity
• Measure Hubble's constant
• Two possible explanations for Hubble's law
• Hubble's law caused by the expansion of space
• Hubble expansion: balloon analogy
• Hubble expansion: leads to redshift of photons
• Estimate the age of the Universe
• Age of the Universe and Hubble's constant
• Lookback time explanation

Chapter 13: The Big Bang Theory

• Eras of the Universe
• Origin of the cosmic microwave background

• Cosmic inflation explains the uniformity of the CMB

Chapter 14: Dark Matter and Dark Energy

• Rotation curve for a merry-go-round
• Rotation curve for the solar system
• Rotation curve for a spiral galaxy
• Solar system rotation varying Sun's mass
• Doppler shifts for an edge-on spiral galaxy
• Evidence for dark matter in spiral galaxies
• Determine the distribution of dark matter in a spiral galaxy
• Gravitational lensing by a cluster of galaxies
• Dark matter in the Bullet Cluster
• Large-scale structure in the Universe

• Cosmic evolution with dark matter
• Cosmic evolution with dark matter and dark energy
• History and fate of the Universe

Chapter 15: Life in the Universe

• Finding planets with transits, like Kepler
• Habitable zone

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Last updated: December 6, 2011 swj