Image: NGC 7129, a reflection nebula with a cluster of young stars (imaged in the infrared by the Spitzer Space Telescope)

This module assumes no previous knowledge of astronomy and
astrophysics. It introduces the basic concepts and skills needed for the first year laboratory course Astrolab (for PaA and PaSR students) and for the Astrophysics lectures in later years.

• Solutions to practice problems and a pdf file containing ConceptTests from throughout the course will be made available below at the end of the course.
  

Introduction and basic astronomical definitions:

Lecture 1: Introduction - astronomy as an observational science; the sky; Celestial (RA/Dec) and Galactic coordinates
Lecture 2: Measuring time, angle and distance
Lecture 3: Luminosity, brightness (including magnitudes) and telescopes
Lecture 4: Temperature, colour and spectral properties of stars
Lecture 5: The Hertzsprung-Russell diagram; standard candles; the distance ladder
Lecture 6: Multiwavelength astronomy; the Universe

Lecture 7: The basic physics of a star - hydrostatic equilibrium and the virial theorem; supply and transport of energy
Lecture 8: The interstellar medium and the birth of stars; protostars and evolution to the main sequence; star clusters
Lecture 9: Post-main sequence evolution and the death of low mass stars
Lecture 10: The death of stars - white dwarfs, the late evolution of massive stars, supernovae and supernova remnants
Lecture 11: Neutron stars, pulsars and black holes
Lecture 12: Galaxies: the Milky Way galaxy, rotation curves and dark matter, other galaxies and the Hubble classification scheme
Lecture 13: Galaxies: active galaxies, galaxy environments and large scale structure, galaxy clusters and dark matter, galaxy formation
Lecture 14: Cosmology: Hubble's law, the Big Bang, the cosmic microwave background, the geometry and fate of the Universe

ConceptTests from the course.

Universe 7th ed. or 8th ed. - website for the course textbook.
Astronomy Picture of the day
Bad Astronomy
Sky and Telescope Magazine
Galaxies and the Universe - notes from a course by Bill Keel
Ned Wright's cosmology tutorial at UCLA

• The recommended textbook is "Universe" 7th or 8th edition, by  Roger A. Freedman & William J. Kaufmann III, 2004, W.H.Freeman and Co.: It is recommended that every PaA student purchase this book. It comes with a CD-ROM containing extra material which is linked to sections in the textbook for enhanced learning, and planetarium software that will be useful for this module and later on.
• Astronomy: A physical perspective by Marc L. Kutner, 2003, Cambridge University Press: If you are really interested in the physics of astrophysics (which you should be, since this is a physics programme), then this book is highly recommended, for this introductory course, and far beyond.