2020-04-262020-04-262019Martoff, Charles Jeffrey. Syllabus for Introduction of Astronomy. Department of Physics, Temple U, Philadelphia, Fall 2019.http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12613/192The course is an introduction to astronomy. Things you see in the night sky are incredibly far away and most likely impossible for Earthlings to ever visit. However, it may or may not surprise you that scientists have good reason to believe that they understand quite a lot about the internal workings of lots of these objects. Stars, for example, including the Sun, are believed to be very well understood overall. Knowing how the Sun works, for example, starts with determining how far away it is (tens of thousands of times farther away than the other side of the Earth) and how big it is (hundreds times as big in diameter as the Earth). It may surprise you that these simple facts could not be figured out until the 19th Century, after over 4,000 years of hard work in astronomy. Astronomy started with people looking at the sky. Just by looking (carefully, keeping records of what they saw) they managed to figure out an amazing amount of important stuff about how the universe works. Like how the planets in the solar system move. About a third of the content in this course will be about what can you see in the sky, when and how. The other 2/3 of the course will tell you what’s known about stars, galaxies, and the universe as a whole, and how it was figured out. The planets are extremely interesting too, and robotic missions like the Mars Rovers are giving a huge amount of detailed information about them. But I've decided not to say much about the planets in this course. This will leave time for more material about stars, black holes, the Big Bang and the like, which I think most students find more interesting.5 pagesengAll Rights ReservedPhysics--Outlines, syllabi, etcAstronomy--Study and teachingText