Astronomy

[Skybird]

I have invested money today into an nold field of interest of mine, astronomy.

In the early 80s, when I was at Gymnasium in Berlin, regular astronomy courses additional to regular physics courses and also counting for the final notes of the Abitur, were rare, and considered to be exotic. My good old school


http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rheingau-Oberschule (gotta love that building)

offered two such courses, which was lucky, because I managed to squeeze out maximum points A+ for both courses without needing to work for it, which helped my final Abitur mean score quite a bit.

I considered it for weeks now and now have decided to engage on the field of astronomy again, because I have the time, the interest, and the investements made today I can afford. So I separated from 80 bucks and bought a copy of Bennett/Donahue/Schneider/Voit: The Cosmic Perspective, 5th edition (German), after i checked it in the bookshop for almost one hour, finding myself increasingly excited and fascinated. While not everything is new to me, the wide perspective and the level of detail neverthelss is new indeed, coupled with very student-friendly access to the matter, minimising the use of number stuff and formulas, giving good and plenty illustrations, and also containing another planetarium software (Stargazer 4.5, I knew Cellestia and Stellarium so far) as well as access to the online platform http://www.masteringastronomy.com/. I consider to register there as well and maybe follow a full course they offer, but i will wait a while until i have dived a bit into the book, which with almost 4 kilograms and 1150 pages is nothing you want to read while already lying in your bed in the evening.

Has anyone experience with that online course and has some advice and reommendations on it?

However, it feels as if I got a quality book there, and exactly what matches my need and interest best: non-professional, but purely private interest, coupled with easy access and ergonomic presentation.

Feels like a happy day today! And 80 bucks well-spent.

[SteamWake]

Nope no experience with that course.

But...

http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/show...ight=telescope

[XabbaRus]

Hi Sky

I have a telescope now but haven't used it due to lousy weather and too light nights.

Anyway there is another free astronomy program called Cartes du Ciel

http://www.ap-i.net/skychart/start

The above link is for version 3. There is an earlier version too.

I use it on my netbook as it doesn't require the high graphics that Stellarium does. In fact for skuy mapping it is better as it is clearer.

I have both versions installed and it is very good.

As for online classes I haven't a clue.

[Skybird]

Thanks Xabba, SteamWake.

The online course is by the same authors who wrote the book, and it is en detail basing on the book, allowing tutors to interact with their students at university beyond the level of normal university relations, it features additonal material and interactive multimedia things. It seems to be the perfect complementation for the book. Book and online platform both are published and run by no unknown in academic publishing, Pearson Education Publishing. They offer this dual approach for several of their books. It became well-known, it seems, especially for their basic teaching book on physics.

I went through the several pages of explanations on the didactics and desgin of the book, and the structure of the presentation. Also there was a forword by a guest writer that immediately touched a string in me, I liked it so much that I searched the web for the original English essay that the author had published in a science magazine three years ago (for obvious reasons I preferred to buy the book in German...) , and I found it.

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did:

Cosmic Perspective

By Neil deGrasse Tyson
Universe: The 100th Essay April 2007



Of all the sciences cultivated by mankind, Astronomy is acknowledged to be, and undoubtedly is, the most sublime, the most interesting, and the most useful. For, by knowledge derived from this science, not only the bulk of the Earth is discovered . . . but our very faculties are enlarged with the grandeur of the ideas it conveys, our minds exalted above [their] low contracted prejudices. —James Ferguson, Astronomy Explained Upon Sir Isaac Newton’s Principles, And Made Easy To Those Who Have Not Studied Mathematics (1757)
Long before anyone knew that the universe had a beginning, before we knew that the nearest large galaxy lies two and a half million light-years from Earth, before we knew how stars work or whether atoms exist, James Ferguson's enthusiastic introduction to his favorite science rang true. Yet his words, apart from their eighteenth-century flourish, could have been written yesterday.

But who gets to think that way? Who gets to celebrate this cosmic view of life? Not the migrant farmworker. Not the sweatshop worker. Certainly not the homeless person rummaging through the trash for food. You need the luxury of time not spent on mere survival. You need to live in a nation whose government values the search to understand humanity's place in the universe. You need a society in which intellectual pursuit can take you to the frontiers of discovery, and in which news of your discoveries can be routinely disseminated. By those measures, most citizens of industrialized nations do quite well.

Yet the cosmic view comes with a hidden cost. When I travel thousands of miles to spend a few moments in the fast-moving shadow of the Moon during a total solar eclipse, sometimes I lose sight of Earth.

When I pause and reflect on our expanding universe, with its galaxies hurtling away from one another, embedded within the ever-stretching, four-dimensional fabric of space and time, sometimes I forget that uncounted people walk this Earth without food or shelter, and that children are disproportionately represented among them.

When I pore over the data that establish the mysterious presence of dark matter and dark energy throughout the universe, sometimes I forget that every day—every twenty-four-hour rotation of Earth—people kill and get killed in the name of someone else's conception of God, and that some people who do not kill in the name of God kill in the name of their nation's needs or wants.

When I track the orbits of asteroids, comets, and planets, each one a pirouetting dancer in a cosmic ballet choreographed by the forces of gravity, sometimes I forget that too many people act in wanton disregard for the delicate interplay of Earth's atmosphere, oceans, and land, with consequences that our children and our children's children will witness and pay for with their health and well-being.

And sometimes I forget that powerful people rarely do all they can to help those who cannot help themselves.

I occasionally forget those things because, however big the world is—in our hearts, our minds, and our outsize atlases—the universe is even bigger. A depressing thought to some, but a liberating thought to me.

Consider an adult who tends to the traumas of a child: a broken toy, a scraped knee, a schoolyard bully. Adults know that kids have no clue what constitutes a genuine problem, because inexperience greatly limits their childhood perspective.

As grown-ups, dare we admit to ourselves that we, too, have a collective immaturity of view? Dare we admit that our thoughts and behaviors spring from a belief that the world revolves around us? Apparently not. And the evidence abounds. Part the curtains of society's racial, ethnic, religious, national, and cultural conflicts, and you find the human ego turning the knobs and pulling the levers.

Now imagine a world in which everyone, but especially people with power and influence, holds an expanded view of our place in the cosmos. With that perspective, our problems would shrink—or never arise at all—and we could celebrate our earthly differences while shunning the behavior of our predecessors who slaughtered each other because of them.

Back in February 2000, the newly rebuilt Hayden Planetarium featured a space show called “Passport to the Universe,” which took visitors on a virtual zoom from New York City to the edge of the cosmos. En route the audience saw Earth, then the solar system, then the 100 billion stars of the Milky Way galaxy shrink to barely visible dots on the planetarium dome.

Within a month of opening day, I received a letter from an Ivy League professor of psychology whose expertise was things that make people feel insignificant. I never knew one could specialize in such a field. The guy wanted to administer a before-and-after questionnaire to visitors, assessing the depth of their depression after viewing the show. “Passport to the Universe,” he wrote, elicited the most dramatic feelings of smallness he had ever experienced.

How could that be? Every time I see the space show (and others we've produced), I feel alive and spirited and connected. I also feel large, knowing that the goings-on within the three-pound human brain are what enabled us to figure out our place in the universe.

[pagebreak]Allow me to suggest that it's the professor, not I, who has misread nature. His ego was too big to begin with, inflated by delusions of significance and fed by cultural assumptions that human beings are more important than everything else in the universe.

In all fairness to the fellow, powerful forces in society leave most of us susceptible. As was I . . . until the day I learned in biology class that more bacteria live and work in one centimeter of my colon than the number of people who have ever existed in the world. That kind of information makes you think twice about who—or what—is actually in charge.

From that day on, I began to think of people not as the masters of space and time but as participants in a great cosmic chain of being, with a direct genetic link across species both living and extinct, extending back nearly 4 billion years to the earliest single-celled organisms on Earth.

I know what you're thinking: we're smarter than bacteria.

No doubt about it, we're smarter than every other living creature that ever walked, crawled, or slithered on Earth. But how smart is that? We cook our food. We compose poetry and music. We do art and science. We're good at math. Even if you're bad at math, you're probably much better at it than the smartest chimpanzee, whose genetic identity varies in only trifling ways from ours. Try as they might, primatologists will never get a chimpanzee to learn the multiplication table or do long division.

If small genetic differences between us and our fellow apes account for our vast difference in intelligence, maybe that difference in intelligence is not so vast after all.

Imagine a life-form whose brainpower is to ours as ours is to a chimpanzee's. To such a species our highest mental achievements would be trivial. Their toddlers, instead of learning their ABCs on Sesame Street, would learn multivariable calculus on Boolean Boulevard. Our most complex theorems, our deepest philosophies, the cherished works of our most creative artists, would be projects their schoolkids bring home for Mom and Dad to display on the refrigerator door. These creatures would study Stephen Hawking (who occupies the same endowed professorship once held by Newton at the University of Cambridge) because he's slightly more clever than other humans, owing to his ability to do theoretical astrophysics and other rudimentary calculations in his head.

If a huge genetic gap separated us from our closest relative in the animal kingdom, we could justifiably celebrate our brilliance. We might be entitled to walk around thinking we're distant and distinct from our fellow creatures. But no such gap exists. Instead, we are one with the rest of nature, fitting neither above nor below, but within.

Need more ego softeners? Simple comparisons of quantity, size, and scale do the job well.

Take water. It's simple, common, and vital. There are more molecules of water in an eight-ounce cup of the stuff than there are cups of water in all the world's oceans. Every cup that passes through a single person and eventually rejoins the world's water supply holds enough molecules to mix 1,500 of them into every other cup of water in the world. No way around it: some of the water you just drank passed through the kidneys of Socrates, Genghis Khan, and Joan of Arc.

How about air? Also vital. A single breathful draws in more air molecules than there are breathfuls of air in Earth's entire atmosphere. That means some of the air you just breathed passed through the lungs of Napoleon, Beethoven, Lincoln, and Billy the Kid.

Time to get cosmic. There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on any beach, more stars than seconds have passed since Earth formed, more stars than words and sounds ever uttered by all the humans who ever lived.

Want a sweeping view of the past? Our unfolding cosmic perspective takes you there. Light takes time to reach Earth's observatories from the depths of space, and so you see objects and phenomena not as they are but as they once were. That means the universe acts like a giant time machine: the farther away you look, the further back in time you see—back almost to the beginning of time itself. Within that horizon of reckoning, cosmic evolution unfolds continuously, in full view.

Want to know what we're made of? Again, the cosmic perspective offers a bigger answer than you might expect. The chemical elements of the universe are forged in the fires of high-mass stars that end their lives in stupendous explosions, enriching their host galaxies with the chemical arsenal of life as we know it. The result? The four most common chemically active elements in the universe—hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen—are the four most common elements of life on Earth. We are not simply in the universe. The universe is in us.

Yes, we are stardust. But we may not be of this Earth. Several separate lines of research, when considered together, have forced investigators to reassess who we think we are and where we think we came from.
First, computer simulations show that when a large asteroid strikes a planet, the surrounding areas can recoil from the impact energy, catapulting rocks into space. From there, they can travel to—and land on—other planetary surfaces. Second, microorganisms can be hardy. Some survive the extremes of temperature, pressure, and radiation inherent in space travel. If the rocky flotsam from an impact hails from a planet with life, microscopic fauna could have stowed away in the rocks' nooks and crannies. Third, recent evidence suggests that shortly after the formation of our solar system, Mars was wet, and perhaps fertile, even before Earth was.
[pagebreak]Those findings mean it's conceivable that life began on Mars and later seeded life on Earth, a process known as panspermia. So all earthlings might—just might—be descendants of Martians.

Again and again across the centuries, cosmic discoveries have demoted our self-image. Earth was once assumed to be astronomically unique, until astronomers learned that Earth is just another planet orbiting the Sun. Then we presumed the Sun was unique, until we learned that the countless stars of the night sky are suns themselves. Then we presumed our galaxy, the Milky Way, was the entire known universe, until we established that the countless fuzzy things in the sky are other galaxies, dotting the landscape of our known universe.

Today, how easy it is to presume that one universe is all there is. Yet emerging theories of modern cosmology, as well as the continually reaffirmed improbability that anything is unique, require that we remain open to the latest assault on our plea for distinctiveness: multiple universes, otherwise known as the “multiverse,” in which ours is just one of countless bubbles bursting forth from the fabric of the cosmos.

The cosmic perspective flows from fundamental knowledge. But it's more than just what you know. It's also about having the wisdom and insight to apply that knowledge to assessing our place in the universe. And its attributes are clear:

The cosmic perspective comes from the frontiers of science, yet it is not solely the provenance of the scientist. It belongs to everyone.
The cosmic perspective is humble.
The cosmic perspective is spiritual—even redemptive—but not religious.
The cosmic perspective enables us to grasp, in the same thought, the large and the small.
The cosmic perspective opens our minds to extraordinary ideas but does not leave them so open that our brains spill out, making us susceptible to believing anything we're told.
The cosmic perspective opens our eyes to the universe, not as a benevolent cradle designed to nurture life but as a cold, lonely, hazardous place.
The cosmic perspective shows Earth to be a mote, but a precious mote and, for the moment, the only home we have.
The cosmic perspective finds beauty in the images of planets, moons, stars, and nebulae but also celebrates the laws of physics that shape them.
The cosmic perspective enables us to see beyond our circumstances, allowing us to transcend the primal search for food, shelter, and sex.
The cosmic perspective reminds us that in space, where there is no air, a flag will not wave—an indication that perhaps flag waving and space exploration do not mix.
The cosmic perspective not only embraces our genetic kinship with all life on Earth but also values our chemical kinship with any yet-to-be discovered life in the universe, as well as our atomic kinship with the universe itself.

At least once a week, if not once a day, we might each ponder what cosmic truths lie undiscovered before us, perhaps awaiting the arrival of a clever thinker, an ingenious experiment, or an innovative space mission to reveal them. We might further ponder how those discoveries may one day transform life on Earth.

Absent such curiosity, we are no different from the provincial farmer who expresses no need to venture beyond the county line, because his forty acres meet all his needs. Yet if all our predecessors had felt that way, the farmer would instead be a cave dweller, chasing down his dinner with a stick and a rock.

During our brief stay on planet Earth, we owe ourselves and our descendants the opportunity to explore—in part because it's fun to do. But there's a far nobler reason. The day our knowledge of the cosmos ceases to expand, we risk regressing to the childish view that the universe figuratively and literally revolves around us. In that bleak world, arms-bearing, resource-hungry people and nations would be prone to act on their “low contracted prejudices.” And that would be the last gasp of human enlightenment—until the rise of a visionary new culture that could once again embrace the cosmic perspective.

http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/print/1367

Tyson is none of the scientists contributing to this book, they just used his essay from another publication as a forword. To me it is a nice and sympathetic summary on the meaning of science, and why science is anti-religious - but certainly also is deeply spiritual.

[Gerald]

Originally Posted by XabbaRus

Hi Sky

I have a telescope now but haven't used it due to lousy weather and too light nights.

Anyway there is another free astronomy program called Cartes du Ciel

http://www.ap-i.net/skychart/start

The above link is for version 3. There is an earlier version too.

I use it on my netbook as it doesn't require the high graphics that Stellarium does. In fact for skuy mapping it is better as it is clearer.

I have both versions installed and it is very good.

As for online classes I haven't a clue.

Do you have more interesting links to other places or objects?

[TLAM Strike]

Joking aside Tyson is a great guy, very smart and and know how to make the complex understandable. I hope you enjoy your new book Sky.


Slight thread hijack but I've been considering buying a pair of cheap binoculars for stargazing and wondering if anyone around here has had any success with them for that?

And no I am not planning on using them for searching the sky at night for Klingon invasion.

[Pioneer]

Jump in.

I completed my degree with a major in Astronomy, not celestial though. For two years I had to complete mine online as I was stationed remotely from campus.

Any on line course is better than not doing it all.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Pioneer

Jump in.

I completed my degree with a major in Astronomy, not celestial though. For two years I had to complete mine online as I was stationed remotely from campus.

Any on line course is better than not doing it all.

I envy you, in the US you can study astronomy as a separate discipline, but not in germany, here it only is one one or two basic courses in the second part of studying physics. If it would be a separate disipline here, maybe my life would have run different, for it could have been that then I would have studied astronomy instead of psychology. Physics scared me away although I hold a high general interest in natural science, first because the plenty of time spend with basic mechanics does not intrest me (it seems to be the bigest chapüter in any physics book), and second: too much formulas and mathematics. I'm weak in doing these. My skills end beyond simple trigonometry, percentage calculations, the rule of three, and simple fractional arithmetic. the statistics courses at university left me only a theopretical understanding of the backgrounds. I would be unable to calculate a logarithm or a cluster analysis out of the blue.

[Vladivostok]

Originally Posted by Skybird

I envy you, in the US you can study astronomy as a separate discipline, but not in germany, here it only is one one or two basic courses in the second part of studying physics.

The university of Stockholm offers a programme in astronomy, and seeing it's all EU/EES the education itself is free. The down-side to it would probably be that the entire programme is held in Swedish. With a will of steel though...

[Pioneer]

Originally Posted by Skybird

I envy you, in the US you can study astronomy as a separate discipline,

Clarification: I completed my degree while still living in Australia.

[Skybird]

On the matter, two highly interesting sources, just in case you do not know them:

http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/Home.aspx
Fascinating!!!

http://hubblesite.org/
Check the so-called ultra deep field photographs. when watching them for long enough time, trying to grasp what your eyes is being shown, you lose any motivation to discuss and to debate - but you just be, and that is all. If any more argument is needed for claiming that science and spirituality go ahnd in hand - these pictures are delivering them, non-verbal and culture-free.

On the book and online course I mentioned, I can only say: the book is brilliant, the best didactic presentation of material for students that I have ever seen, in the way that it does it's job much better than any book I have had when studying psychology. If you plan to embark on learning a bit of substantial basic training in general astronomy, but also want a decent level of academic standrad and detail, and want material being covered that would match let's say two semestres of introductory courses in astronomy at college or university, than this is probably by far the best choice you can consider. Compared to what is offred online and in the book, the price is cheap.

I have nothing but praise for that book.

Actually I am spending systematical working effort and time on it as if I were studying for real. It is very great fun. the best decision I have made since quite some time.

[Weiss Pinguin]

Originally Posted by Skybird

but i will wait a while until i have dived a bit into the book, which with almost 4 kilograms and 1150 pages is nothing you want to read while already lying in your bed in the evening.

Sounds like it's time for a 1x TC patrol I wish you luck in your studies

[XabbaRus]

I have put the book on my amazon wishlist.

I'll give you guys the URL and if you feel generous please purchase..

Only kidding but I am looking into it.

I'm looking at getting a 2x Barlow lense for my scope. It already has a 10mm eyepiece and a 25mm wide field so from asking on forums it has been suggested that a barlow is the way to go as I am still learning.

My scope is a 130 diameter parabloic mirror with a 650 long tube.

Skywatcher 130P, won some awards and all round has good reviews.

[Platapus]

I have very fond memories of using my telescope to look at the heavenly bodies..... what a sight.... breathtaking.....then she started closing the drapes.

[Gerald]

Originally Posted by Platapus

I have very fond memories of using my telescope to look at the heavenly bodies..... what a sight.... breathtaking.....then she started closing the drapes.