Week 1

We were thrilled to see over 1,000 students enrolled in the course by the end of day one! Thanks for joining us. We hit 1,200 students later in the week, making us larger than any other University of Arizona class ever.

Week one was all about observing, and the technological advancements that allow us to build bigger and bigger telescopes.

Chris interviewed:

• Buddy Martin, the Chief Polishing Scientist at the Steward Observatory Mirror Lab here at the University of Arizona
• Michael Lesser, Director of the University of Arizona Imaging Technology Laboratory.
• Roger Angel, Director of the Steward Observatory Mirror Lab

You can listen to the interviews here:



Isn't the work they do at the Mirror Lab incredible? If you're ever in Tucson, stop by the University of Arizona campus and get a tour! If you're lucky, they'll be cooking up one of the 7 mirrors for the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) while you're there. You'll be able to see the oven spinning, and feel the heat from it. And they're almost always polishing one of the GMT mirrors or the primary mirror of what will be the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST).





Many of you participated in the assignment for this first week of class.  Our gmail inbox and Facebook page were full of awe inspiring astronomical images. We'd like to share a few of them with everyone here.

Credit: HiRISE, MRO, LPL (U. Arizona), NASA

Mandy Shaw shared this image of Mars via Facebook. 

One of my favorite astronomical images is of the pinkish, frost-covered sands on Mars. Captured by the Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2008, the image seems to show trees! But, in fact, they are not trees (and cast no shadows), but instead are streaks of cascading, frost-free sands.

NASA Voyager Mission

Rick Mutton shared this image of Jupiter via Facebook.

This image holds a special place for me - it was taken by Voyager 1 in 1979, when I was in grade 8 and really got me interested in astronomy and science.

Credit: NASA; ESA; G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch, University of California, Santa Cruz; R. Bouwens, Leiden University; and the HUDF09 Team

Finally, Zachary Zalneraitis (@zzalnera) shared this image of the Hubble Deep Field with us via Twitter.

What exists in the darkness of Hubble XDF amazes me.

Thanks for all of your submissions! Many of you shared images you've taken yourself. We are very impressed by your work. If you're an astrophotographer, and you'd like us to include you in a blog post about students in this class who do astrophotography, email astronomysota@gmail.com with information about you and where we can find your work online, or one of your favorite images.

Next week we'll be traveling out beyond Earth, into our solar system. Lectures will cover some of the neighboring worlds we are very interested in exploring. We'll talk about the past, the present, and the future of Mars exploration, as well as where we've found water in our solar system.

If you really enjoyed the observing and telescopes week, here's one last video about a great telescope called SOFIA.

Welcome to the class!

I'm excited that we are underway and there are over 800 of you, spread around the U.S. and the world. The first week of materials on telescopes and detectors are posted:

• An overview video
• .pdf slides on all topics
• Video mini-lectures on 7 of those topics (the "cutting edge" ones)
• An activity, and
• A simple quiz

As we start I'd like to ask each of you to register on the Teach Astronomy web site (if you pre-registered on that site, you don't need to do this). The minimal information you provide will be kept secure and only used in relation to astronomy and this course. I need this to be able to communicate with you directly (which is not possible in Udemy), and to share additional instructional resources and social media conversations about the course (neither of which can be hosted by Udemy). I hope you enjoy the information and the experience. Chris I.