1. A Brief Tour of the Universe
Light travels at 186,000 miles/sec = 300,000 km/sec
Enormous distances mean that the farther away the object, the farther back in time we are looking

2. Influence of moon - tides
Atmosphere
Composition
Surface activity - Continental drift and plate tectonics
Rotation and Revolution
Days
Seasons

3. Cratering
Phases
Eclipses - Lunar (Moon passes through Earth’s shadow)

4. Solar eclipse - Moon passes directly in front of the sun
Corona - Sun’s outer atmosphere

5. Planets - Mercury (Closest to sun)
Similar to moon

6. Mars
Surface - canyons and canals
Olympus Mons - Largest known volcano in solar system (3x Mt. Everest)
Mars Rover - spectrometer equipped (determine chemical composition)

7. Jovian Planets (Gas Giants)
Jupiter (320x mass of Earth)
Great Red Spot (Hurricane-like storm over 300 yrs. Old)

8. Saturn
Rings - Composition, how they formed
Can see three moons at bottom

9. Smaller objects - comets, asteroids and meteors

10. Sun - Center of solar system, orbited by planets, 5800K
Sunspots - cooler regions of sun’s surface, evidence that sun rotates

11. Stars - learn how they are classified
Closest Star - 4 light years away
Pleiades - open cluster - Few hundred to tens of thousands of young stars
Omega Centauri - Globular cluster - Millions of older stars dating back to formation of Milky Way
Globular cluster shown

12. Hubble space telescope - Atmosphere opaque to many wavelengths of light
Emission nebula - Hot glowing gas - star formation
Eagle nebula - pillars of cold gas and dust (Hubble image)

13. Horsehead nebula in the constellation Orion

14. More Nebula

15. Stellar Death: supernovas
Supernova remnants
1054 AD, Supernova observed by Chinese astronomers
Remnants of Vela supernova

16. Neutron Stars and Black Holes
Neutron star - Incredibly dense (Thimbleful of material weighs 100 million tons - about the mass of an average mountain
Black hole - so massive that not even light can escape - “pinches” itself off from rest of the universe - Artist conception of binary visible-black hole system shown

17. Milky Way Galaxy
Looking towards galactic center towards Earth
Artists conception of Milky Way - Spiral galaxy with supermassive black hole at the center

18. Galaxies - 20 to 30 million light years away containing hundreds of billions of stars
Spiral, elliptical, and irregular

19. Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation
Temperature range of only 400 Millionths of a Kelvin
Evidence for Big Bang