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
• Powers of Ten
• Cosmic Eye - like Powers of Ten, but more modern graphics and science
• Cosmic Voyage - 35 min survey of the universe

Chapter 2: The Sky, Solar and Lunar Motions, Eclipses

• Solar Motions Demonstrator
• Sun's Position on Horizon
• 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
• Zoom out showing a person's horizon
• Position of Sun w.r.t. horizon vs time of day
• The Sun's apparent path through the zodiac

• How Moon's illumination becomes observed phase
• Simulating phases of the Moon
• Phases of the Moon
• When the Moon rises or sets vs phase
• Moon rotates once per orbit
• Animation of Moon lunation

• 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 (and Matter)

• Anatomy of a wave
• Visible light waves
• The electromagnetic spectrum: frequency and wavelength
• The electromagnetic spectrum: examples
• How to remember the electromagnetic spectrum
• An example of hearing the Doppler effect as a car passes
• Shows how the absorption of a photon excites an electron to a higher energy, followed by de-excitation and the emission of a photon
• Demonstrates the creation of continuum, absorption line, and emission line spectra
• How the phase of water changes with temperature

Extra-Solar Planets

• How the spectrum of a star changes due to the Doppler effect as it orbits the center of mass
• How the velocity vs time (velocity curve) of a star depends on the mass and orbital radius of the planet
• Example of how a planet transiting a star affects the observed brightness

The Sun and Stars

• The Sun viewed at multiple wavelengths.
• How the parallax angle changes with distance.
• Computer simulation of the collapse of a 50 solar mass gas cloud.
• Images of the Orion Nebula, the site of active star formation closest to the Sun, made with light of different wavelengths.
• A pictorial representation of the stars present in a cluster as it gets older.
• Interactive diagram showing schematic H-R diagrams for star clusters with different ages and theoretical isochrones with different ages.

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Last updated: February 20, 2019 tp