The Night Sky!
Looking up with wonder since ancient times

Humans have always looked up and tried to make sense of the universe, but our conception of it has evolved dramatically over the centuries. This 3 week course is a celebration of history’s great astronomers, the observable wonders in the night sky, and how we may better appreciate them. We’ll look at the early models conceived by the Greeks and how they were gradually overturned during the Scientific Revolution in the 1600s. The common natural night sky objects will be enumerated and their appearance and motion explained. The ways to observe and appreciate these objects, from the naked eye to telescopes of all sizes, will be reviewed. We’ll conclude with an introduction to the history and role of a local observatory in Mississippi Mills.  

Session 1: A review of how the first astronomers, including the great thinkers of Greece, understood the heavens; the flaws with their models, and how the work of Copernicus, Tycho, Kepler, and Galileo culminated in Newton's correct description of the observable heavens. We’ll briefly cover the more recent contributions of Einstein and Hubble.

Session 2: A description of the objects we can observe in the sky, both within our solar system (the moon, planets, meteors, comets) and beyond it (stars and constellations, nebulas, star clusters & galaxies).

Session 3: A summary of ways to observe the skies, from the naked eye, to amateur telescopes, giant professional instruments, and space telescopes. The role of observatories, including our local “hidden gem”, the Fred Lossing Observatory, will be explained, in the context of our modern challenge, “light pollution.”