Finding our place in space : Naked sky, naked eye : finding your way in the dark : Sun days ; Flat earth, big bowl : Man in the moon ; Lights and wanderers ; Celestial coordinates ; Measuring the sky ; The size of things, or “I am crushing your head!”. Celestial portraits : The dippers first ; The stars of spring ; Summer nights ; Fall constellations ; Winter skies. Who cares? -- Ancient evenings: the first watchers : A dragon eats the sun: ancient Chinese astronomy : Why the emperor executed Hsi and Ho ; Time, space, and harmony. Babylon revisited : The Venus tablet ; Draftsmen of the constellations?. Egypt looks : Celestial pyramids ; The universe-in-a-box. Stonehenge and the new world ; Grecian formula : Anaximander puts earth in space ; Anaximenes says stars burn ; Pythagoras calls earth a globe ; Anaxagoras explains eclipses ; Aristarchus sets the sun in the middle and us in motion ; Eratosthenes sizes up the earth -- The unexplained motions of the heavens : Time on our hands : What really happens in a day? ; A month of moons ; Another wrinkle in time ; To everything a season. The sun goes dark, the moon becomes blood ; Aristotle lays down the law ; Ptolemy’s picture ; Night falls -- Astronomy reborn: 1543-1687 : Arabian nights ; Heresy of a Polish priest : “More pleasing to the mind” ; A revolution of revolutions. The man with the golden nose : Kepler makes sense of it : Three laws. Galileo’s eye ; Holding it all together : Newton’s three laws of motion ; Weighty matters ; It’s not just a good idea -- Now you see it (now you don’t) : The art of collecting light (with a telescope) : Slice of light : The whole spectrum. Buckets of light : The telescope is born ; Refraction… ; …Or reflection? ; Variations on an optical theme. Size matters : The power to gather light ; The power to resolve an image. Twinkle, twinkle : Computer assist ; Fun house mirrors ; Observatory in space: the Hubble space telescope -- You and your telescope : Do I really need a telescope? ; Science aside, what will it cost? ; Decisions, decisions : Refractors: virtues and vices ; Reflectors: Newton’s favorite ; Rich-field telescopes: increasing in popularity ; Schmidt-Cassegrain: high-performance hybrid ; Maksutov-Cassegrain: new market leader : Dobsonians: more for your money?. The go-to revolution ; I’ve bought my telescope, now what? : Grab a piece of sky ; Become an astrophotographer ; Light pollution and what to do about it ; Finding what you’re looking for. Learning to see : Low-light adjustment ; Don’t look too hard -- Over the rainbow : Making waves : Anatomy of a wave ; New wave ; Big news from little places. Full spectrum : The long and the short of it ; What makes color?. Heavenly scoop : Atmospheric ceilings and skylights ; The black-body spectrum ; Watch your head, here comes an equation ; Read any good spectral lines lately? -- Seeing in the dark : Dark doesn’t mean you can’t see : A telephone man tunes in ; Anatomy of a radio telescope ; Bigger is better: the green bank telescope ; Interference can be a good thing. What radio astronomers “see” ; You can do this, too! : Amateur radio astronomy: no-cost and low-cost approaches ; Solar flares and meteor events ; ET phone home. The rest of the spectrum : New infrared and ultraviolet observations ; Chandrasekhar and the x-ray revolution ; Capturing the full spectrum -- Space race: from Sputnik to the International Space Station : This really is rocket science : From scientific tool to weapon and back again ; Playing with balloons ; The battle cry of Sputnik. Early human missions ; Satellites and probes : The Explorers ; Observatories in space. JFK’s challenge : Lunar probes ; The Apollo missions. Planetary probes : Mariners and Vikings ; Pioneers and Voyagers ; Magellan, Galileo, and Ulysses ; Mars Observer, Surveyor, and Pathfinder ; A more distant voyager. Space shuttles and space stations : Skylab ; The demise of Mir. International space station: the latest -- A walk around the block : The moon: our closest neighbor : What if we had no moon? ; Lunar looking : What Galileo saw ; What you can see. It’s a moon! : A daughter? ; A sister? ; A captive? ; A fender bender? ; Give and take. Green cheese? : A pocked face ; And what’s inside? -- Solar system home movie : Solar system history : The biggest problem: we weren’t there ; What do we really know about the solar system?. From contraction to condensation : Angular momentum explained ; Pearls the size of worlds ; Birth of the planets ; Accretion and fragmentation. Whipping up the recipe : Out of the frying pan ; Into the fire ; Do the pieces fit?. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust -- Solar system family snapshot : A beautiful day in the neighborhood: let’s take a stroll : Some points of interest ; More or less at the center of it all ; Planetary report card. The inner and outer circles : Snapshot of the terrestrial planets ; Snapshot of the Jovian planets. Serving up the leftovers : The asteroid belt ; Landing on Eros – the love boat ; Rocks and hard places ; Impact? The earth-crossing asteroids. Anatomy of a comet : A tale of two tails ; “Mommy, where do comets come from?” ; A-hunting we will go. Catch a falling star : Meteors, meteoroids, and meteorites ; News from NEAT ; April showers (or the Lyrids) --
So close and yet so far: the inner planets : The terrestrial roster ; Mercury: the moon’s twin : Lashed to the sun ; “I can’t breathe!”. Forecast for Venus: “hot, overcast and dense” : The sun sets on Venus (in the east) ; Venusian atmosphere. The earth: just right ; Mars: “that looks like New Mexico!” : Martian weather report: cold and thin skies : The Martian chronicles ; Why mars is red ; Volcanoes, craters and a “Grand Canyon” ; Water, water anywhere? ; Martian moons. Where to next?
Great balls of gas! the outer planets : The Jovian line-up : Planetary stats ; Latecomers: Uranus and Neptune ; Earthbound view: Uranus and Neptune ; Earthbound views: Jupiter and Saturn ; Views from the Voyagers and Galileo. Rotation: a new twist ; Stormy weather : The great red spot ; Bands of atmosphere ; Layers of gas. Saturnine atmosphere ; Inside the Jovians ; The Jovian magnetospheres
The far end of the block : Lord of the rings : Looking from earth ; Looking with Voyager ; More rings on the far planets. On the shoulders of giants ; Faraway moons : Jupiter’s four Galilean moons ; Titan: Saturn’s highly atmospheric moon ; Triton, Neptune’s large moon ; A dozen more moons in the outer solar system. Pluto found : A “new moon” ; Where did Pluto come from?
To the stars : Our star : The solar furnace : A very special theory ; What’s it made of? ; A spectacular, mediocre star ; Four trillion trillion lightbulbs. The solar atmosphere : Not that kind of chrome ; A luminous crown ; Solar wind. Fun in the sun : A granulated surface ; Galileo sees spots before his eyes ; Sunspots: what they are ; Sunspot cycles ; Coronal fireworks. At the core : Gone fission ; Chain reactions ; Your standard solar model
Of giants and dwarfs: stepping out into the stars : Sizing them up : Radius, luminosity, temperature: a key relationship. The parallax principle : How far away are the stars? ; Nearest and farthest. Do stars move? ; How bright is bright? : Luminosity versus apparent brightness ; Creating a scale of magnitude. How hot is hot? ; Stellar pigeonholes : Using the spectrum. From giants to dwarfs: sorting the stars by size ; Making the main sequence : Off the beaten track ; Stellar mass ; The life expectancy of a star
Stellar careers : A star evolves : The main sequence – again ; From here to eternity ; Swelling and shrinking. Stellar nursing homes : Red giant ; A flash in the pan ; Red giant revisited ; Core and nebula ; White dwarf ; Going nova. The life and death of a high-mass star : Fusion beyond carbon ; Over the edge. Supernova: so long, see you in the next star : Types of supernovae ; The supernova as creator. Neutron stars : In theory ; What the pulsars tell us ; A stellar lighthouse. I can’t stop!
Black holes: one-way tickets to eternity : Is there no end to this pressure? : Black holes: the ultimate end ; What’s that on the event horizon? ; Where’s the surface?. Relativity : What is curved space? ; No escape ; The black-hole neighborhood. Thought experiments : Postcards from the edge ; Into the abyss. Black-hole evidence
Stellar nurseries : An interstellar atlas : Blocking light ; Dusty ingredients ; Flipping out. Star light, star bright : A matter of perspective. The interstellar medium: one big fuel tank : Tripping the switch ; Letting it all out ; Not quite a star ; The “on” switch ; A collapsed souffle. Multiple births ; In the delivery room
Way out of this world : The milky way: much more than a candy bar : Where is the center and where are we? ; Home sweet galaxy : A thumbnail sketch ; Keeping up with the Joneses ; Take a picture, it’ll last longer. Measuring the milky way : Where do we fit in?. Milky way portrait : A monster at the center? ; The birth of the milky way. Dark matters : In the arms of the galaxy
A galaxy of galaxies : Sorting out the galaxies : Spirals: catch a density wave ; Ellipticals: stellar footballs ; Are these reduced? they’re all marked “irregular”. Galactic embrace : Catch the wave. How to “weigh” a galaxy : A big job ; “Its dark out here”. Let’s get organized : Measuring very great distances ; The local group and other galaxy clusters ; Superclusters. Where does it all go? : Hubble’s law and Hubble’s constant ; The big picture
Moving out of town : A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away ; Quasars: looks can be deceiving : Small and bright. Quasars and the evolution of galaxies ; A piece of the action : The violent galaxies of Seyfert ; Cores, jets, and lobes: radio galaxy anatomy. Where it all starts
The big questions : Table for one? : What do you mean by “alone”? : …If you call this living ; Is earth rare? ; The chemistry of life. The odds for life on Mars : The face on Mars. Hello! is anybody out there? : You just love the Drake equation. A closer look at the equation : Galaxy productivity ; Do they all have planets? ; Welcome to the habitable zone ; Let there be life ; Who are you calling intelligent? ; The life span of a civilization. Where are the little green men? : What we look for ; Later, on Oprah ; Down at the old water hole ; Should we reach out? – What about the big bang? : The work of the cosmologist ; I’ll give you two clues : Redshifting away ; Pigeon droppings and the big bang. Same old same old : The cosmological principle. So what was the big bang? : Big bang overview ; A long way from nowhere ; How was the universe made? ; How were atoms made? ; Stretching the waves
(How) will it end? : What the redshift means : Limited options ; A matter of density ; A surprising boomerang ; Run away! run away!. What does it all mean? : What’s the point? ; The universe: closed, open, or flat? ; Saddle up the horses: into the wide-open universe. We have a problem : Down to earth ; Blow it up ; Looks flat to me. Coming full circle.
