 CurrentEvents |
 Don Etz |
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A Brief Tour of the Heavens: What's Out There, and What Is It Doing?
www.arky.org
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A Brief Tour of the Heavens: What's Out There, and What Is It Doing? |
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www.arky.org |
I'm an amateur astronomer, not a professional, a long-time member of the local Miami Valley Astronomical Society and a member of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. My particular interest, natural for an old history major, is the history of astronomy. I've published a couple of articles on this subject.
I won't try to deal with the speculations of cosmologists about the origin of the universe, or with complex subjects like the mathematics of relativity. I'll just cover in general what we see in the sky, why we see it the way we do, and what's happening out there.
First, the Earth in space -- what it's doing and how its motions affect what we see in the sky.
Second, the way people have organized what they see in the sky at night, filling it with pictures called constellations, and setting up coordinate systems to specify where each object is.
Third, the Sun, Moon, and planets, and the other objects we have found in our solar system.
Fourth, the stars near our star, our galaxy, the Milky Way, our galaxy's neighbors, and the galaxies and clusters of galaxies beyond them, to the limit of our present knowledge.
Note: This is a talk about astronomy, the study of the arrangement, motions, and composition of the objects in the sky. It is not about astrology, misguided theories about the influence of these objects on the character and behavior of individuals, nations, and the physical Earth.