Babylon to the Big Bang

LinR course: Fall 2016

1. Introduction
2. Babylon to Greece
3. Greece-Newton
4. Why 1960
5. The planets
6. Comets and Asteroids
7. The Sun
8. Stars
9. Beeps, Flashes and Bangs
10. Galaxies
11. The Size of it
12. Creation Myths 1: the Big Bang
13. Creation Myths 2: the Wild Side

Some Sources:

• NASA
• European Space Observatory (ESO)
• Tunc Tezel
• Anthony Ayiomitas
• Cassini fly-through of Saturn, assembled by Stephen van Vuuren
• Scales of things

Software

• Voyager 4.5 (Carina Soft) My preference
• Starry Night
• Red Shift (available for Ipad)

• Freebies

• stellarium
• Celestia
• Planets: Dana Peters , Downloadable from the App. Store

Books

• Astronomy Today
• Books by Pasachoff are usually good.
• Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries. Neil deGrasse Tyson

Print Journals

• New Scientist: always interesting, usually provocative sometimes wrong!
• Scientific American: usually good, a bit pompous at times
• Astronomy
• Sky And Telescope

Other links:

• Carahunge, Armenia's Stonehenge. (thank you Colin Cole)
• Viewing conditions: it's quite hard to decide in advance if you are going to see anything in the sky. The cleardarksky website helps a lot.
• It's possible to predict aurora, based on the "space weather" reports
• Map of how to find the observatory (on top of the Herzberg building)
• Saturn's moons and Grieg (suggested by Colin COle
• Young's "Textbook of Astronomy for Colleges and Scientific Schools" (from Project Gutenberg