June and July Live Sessions

We'd like to continue holding live sessions, for at least 2 or 3 months, but the instructional team is doing a lot of traveling during the summer months, so we'll only have about 2 live sessions per month. We will definitely be having one tomorrow at 11AM MST/PDT (in 21.5 hours!), and we've tentatively picked some days for June and July.

These dates and times are tentative and may change! But here they are—dates for the next live sessions:
Thursday May 23rd, 11AM MST/PDT (6PM GMT/UTC)
Monday June 3rd, 11AM MST/PDT (6PM GMT/UTC)
Wednesday June 26th, 11AM MST/PDT (6PM GMT/UTC)
Thursday July 19th, 11AM MST/PDT (6PM GMT/UTC)
Some day the last week of July/first week of August

If you miss a live session, post your questions on Udemy. Chris will continue to answer questions posted to our Udemy page.

LHC on The Daily Show

One of our lectures from Section 7, the section on Cosmology, featured a clip from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Watch the whole segment here.


And if you enjoyed that, you'd probably also enjoy this segment about the size of the Andromeda Galaxy from the Colbert Report.

Citizen Science

Did you enjoy doing citizen science through Zooniverse? Zooniverse has 7 citizen science astronomy projects, and they're not the only site perpetuating astronomy citizen science.

Zooniverse

• Galaxy Zoo
• Moon Zoo
• Solar Storm Watch
• Planet Hunters
• The Milky Way Project
• Planet Four
• Space Warps

Cosmoquest

• Moon Mappers
• Planet Mappers
• Asteroid Mappers
• Ice Investigators

GLOBE at Night

SETI@home

And here's an even bigger list compiled by The Planetary Society. We hope you'll continue to contribute to citizen science.

First ASOTA Live Q&A This Friday

Hello everyone!

Professor Chris Impey will be hosting a live online discussion for Astronomy: State of the Art on Friday, April 5th from 3pm to 4pm PDT (Pacific Daylight Time).

Although he will be interacting with students live during the session, we realize not everyone will be able to attend, and we invite you to submit questions ahead of time.  This will also help us keep things organized, and to prepare ahead of time in case of network issues that could make asking questions in the session more difficult.  Please send questions to us via Twitter to @AstronomySOTA or through email to: AstronomySOTA@gmail.com.

There are 3 (three) ways to participate in the live discussion:

1) You can join us on Udemy using their LIVE SESSION tool (you will see the link on the course page).

2) You can join us using the Blackboard Collaborate tool through the University of Arizona.  You will need to install the most recent version of JAVA for this to work.  Simply click on the following link, download the file, and click on it when you have finished downloading (if you get syntax errors, just click OK and it will still work just fine).  The Blackboard Link is: (http://elluminate.oia.arizona.edu/scheduleMeetingnonetid.php?sessionId=1518395)

3) Watch the broadcast on Google+.  We will broadcast the session live in a Google Hangout and the video will be available afterwards on YouTube for those of you who were unable to join us live.  There is currently no good way for us to use G+ to interact with more than 15 people at a time, so for now this tool will be used for broadcasting and recording (YES, you will be able to watch it, even without a Google+ account, and it will be available on our Google+ page and on YouTube after the session has ended).  To watch the broadcast, click on the following URL for our Google+ page. (https://plus.google.com/u/0/110438101511252202485/posts)

We’re looking forward to meeting you!

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.