For the experienced amateur astronomer who is wondering if there is something useful, valuable, and permanent that can be done with his or her observational skills, the answer is, “Yes, there is!” This is THE book for the amateur astronomer who is ready to take the next step in his or her astronomical journey. Till now there has been no text that points curious amateur astronomers to the research possibilities open to them. At the 2006 meeting of the Society for Astronomical Sciences, participants agreed that the lack of such a text was a serious gap in the astronomical book market. This book plugs that hole.

For the experienced amateur astronomer who is wondering if there is something useful, valuable, and permanent that can be done with his or her observational skills, the answer is, “Yes, there is!” This is THE book for the amateur astronomer who is ready to take the next step in his or her astronomical journey. Till now there has been no text that points curious amateur astronomers to the research possibilities open to them. At the 2006 meeting of the Society for Astronomical Sciences, participants agreed that the lack of such a text was a serious gap in the astronomical book market. This book plugs that hole.

Astronomy is a fun and challenging science for students. This manual is intended for one- and two-semester astronomy courses and uses hands-on, engaging activities to get students looking at the sky and developing a lifelong interest in astronomy.

You too can follow in the steps of the great astronomers such as Hipparchus, Galileo, Kepler and Hubble, who all contributed so much to our modern understanding of the cosmos. This book gives the student or amateur astronomer the following tools to replicate some of these seminal observations from their own homes: With your own eyes: Use your own observations and measurements to discover and confirm the phenomena of the seasons, the analemma and the equation of time, the logic behind celestial coordinates, and even the precession of the equinoxes. With a consumer-grade digital camera: Record the changing brightness of an eclipsing binary star and show that a pulsating star changes color as it brightens and dims. Add an inexpensive diffraction grating to your camera and see the variety of spectral features in the stars, and demonstrate that the Sun’s spectrum is similar to one particular type of stellar spectrum. With a backyard telescope: Add a CCD imager and you can measure the scale of the Solar System and the distance to a nearby star. You could even measure the distance to another galaxy and observe the cosmological redshift of the expanding universe. Astronomical Discoveries You Can Make, Too! doesn’t just tell you about the development of astronomy; it shows you how to discover for yourself the essential features of the universe.

This book presents experiments which will teach physics relevant to astronomy. The astronomer, as instructor, frequently faces this need when his college or university has no astronomy department and any astronomy course is taught in the physics department. The physicist, as instructor, will find this intellectually appealing when faced with teaching an introductory astronomy course. From these experiments, the student will acquire important analytical tools, learn physics appropriate to astronomy, and experience instrument calibration and the direct gathering and analysis of data. Experiments that can be performed in one laboratory session as well as semester-long observation projects are included.

A unique collection of thirty experiments ranging from ancient astronomy to cosmology, each containing one or more challenges for the reader. The progression here is from the Earth outward through the solar system to the stellar and galactic realm. Topics include the shape of the sky; Stonehenge as a stone-age abacus; determining the size of the Earth; the distance of the moon, stars and planets; planetary mass, density, temperature and atmosphere; the speed of light; the nature of the quiet and active sun; photometry and spectroscopy; star clusters and variable stars; and fundamental properties of stars.