Lecture 03: The Starry Night

What is the shape and size of the Earth? This lecture traces historical ideas about the shape of the Earth, from ancient ideas of a Flat-Earth to Aristotle's compelling demonstrations in the 3rd century BC that the Earth was a sphere. We then discuss two famous classical measurem ...  Afficher plus

Where are we? Where is someplace else? And how do I get there from here? These are questions we need to answer both on the Earth and in the sky to assign a location to a place or celestial object on the surface of a sphere. This lecture includes a review of angular units and the ...  Afficher plus

Welcome to the Astronomy 161 Lecture Podcasts. This is a brief message from me explaining the podcasts, and welcoming new and old listeners. University. Lectures will begin on Wednesday, 2006 Sept 20, and run through Friday, 2006 December 1. New lectures will appear shortly befor ...  Afficher plus

How can we search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and what are we looking for? This second part of a 2-part lecture picks up where we left off yesterday by examining SETI, the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence, and reviews what we might look for and how. We will use thi ...  Afficher plus

Before we can begin our exploration of astronomy, we need to develop a common language for notating large numbers, and introduce the basic units of length, mass, and time that we will use throughout the quarter. We will first re-introduce the basic metric system, explaining how t ...  Afficher plus