The astronomy taught alongside the telescope building at the DSPIRA summer institute, recorded. These are university lectures given to a room of high school teachers, so they assume no astronomy background but do not talk down.
They run in order and build on each other, but each stands on its own if you only want one.
- Astronomy Lecture 1
- Astronomy Lecture 2
- Astronomy Lecture 3
- Astronomy Lecture 4 — a planetarium session, not recorded
- Astronomy Lecture 5
- Astronomy Lecture 6
- Astronomy Lecture 7
The DSP lecture recordings are the other half of the institute, covering sampling, Fourier analysis and filters.
Who gave them
Dr. Loren Anderson, WVU Department of Physics and Astronomy — units and scales, motion of the sky, time and planning observations, gravity, dark matter, rotation curves.
Dr. D. J. Pisano, then at WVU — light and telescopes, the Doppler effect, stars, stellar evolution, the discovery of the Milky Way, galaxies great and small, galaxy interactions and dark matter.
The slides
All thirteen, in the order they were given.
Dr. Loren Anderson
- Units and Scales
- Motion of the Sky
- Time and Planning Observations
- Gravity
- Dark Matter
- Galactic Rotation Curves
Gravity, Dark Matter and Rotation Curves are the three that the Velocity Curve unit builds toward. If you are teaching that unit and want the physics behind it at a level above the student handouts, start there.
Dr. D. J. Pisano
- Light and Telescopes
- Doppler Effect and Telescopes
- Stars
- Stellar Evolution
- Discovery of the Milky Way
- All Galaxies Great and Small
- Galaxy Interactions and Dark Matter
Figure credits
Some slides in these decks reproduce figures from published astronomy textbooks, marked © 2007 Thomson Higher Education and © 2005 Brooks/Cole – Thomson (both now Cengage Learning). They appear here with permission obtained by the lecturers; that permission covers this use and does not extend to reusing those figures elsewhere. Everything else on this site is under the repository’s own licence.
Reading further
Two places worth knowing about, both free.
-
Essential Radio Astronomy — NRAO’s course. Clear, concise and complete, at a level a step above these lessons. The place to go when you want the derivation rather than the result.
-
Open Source Radio Telescopes — a collaborative collection of radio telescope designs and methods, aimed deliberately at everyone from middle school upward. Other people’s builds, and somewhere to put yours.
For the signal processing side, the GNU Radio wiki is the reference, with tutorials from beginner to advanced.