The Semester at a Glance
Observing the Sky
Constellations, celestial motion, coordinates, seasons, moon phases, and eclipses.
History & Tools of Astronomy
Ancient sky-watching, the Copernican Revolution, telescopes, and spectroscopy.
The Solar System
The Sun, terrestrial planets, gas giants, moons, asteroids, and comets.
Stars
Stellar properties, the H-R diagram, and the stellar life cycle.
Galaxies & Cosmology
The Milky Way, galaxies beyond, the Big Bang, and dark matter/energy.
Life in the Universe & Exploration
Exoplanets, astrobiology, space missions, and your final project.
Welcome to Astronomy
Welcome in. This isn't a physics class in disguise — you won't need to solve for orbital velocity to pass. What you will do is learn to actually look up, recognize what you're seeing, and understand how astronomers pieced together everything from the age of the Sun to the shape of the universe.
We move through a unit a week — the sky itself, the history of how we figured it out, the solar system, stars, galaxies, and cosmology — and you'll keep a running sky journal the whole semester so the class stays connected to the real night sky outside your window.
You don't need a telescope or a math background coming in. Show up, look up, and ask questions — that's the whole deal.
Course Documents
Setting up your sky-journal software and logging your first observation.
📝The recurring sky-journal sheet you'll fill out all semester.
🗺️Every constellation and coordinate concept covered this term. One page. Print it.
⭐ Print this outA Note About AI
- Generate course images
- Build the interactive tools and sky-journal templates
- Format and layout lesson content consistently
- Draft activity instructions and rubrics
This is a class about observing and understanding the real universe, so I use AI to help build it — go ahead and use it too, especially to explore questions that go beyond what we cover in class. The line is between using AI to learn and using it to skip learning.