Backyard astronomy: find your way around the night sky

You start outside, looking up, with nothing more than a chart and a red flashlight. This course begins with the basics every backyard observer needs: how to find north, how to pick out Ursa Major and Polaris, and how to use a simple chart without ruining your night vision. From there you build real, practical skills for finding your way around the sky.

You will learn to use a planisphere to match the sky to the date and time, and how binoculars open up star clusters and even the Andromeda Galaxy before you ever touch a telescope. Star hopping teaches you to navigate between landmark stars with a finderscope, a skill that carries over whether you are using simple optics or a computerized GOTO telescope with setting circles and coordinates. You will also see how a smartphone's night mode and exposure settings can help capture what you see.

Once you are comfortable finding your way, the course opens into the wider world of amateur astronomy. You will learn what separates professional astronomers from amateurs, how light pollution and the Bortle scale affect what you can see, and how ordinary observers contribute to citizen science by watching variable stars and occultations. There is a look at astrophotography, from DSLR cameras to CCD imaging and remote telescopes, and at the people and places that shape amateur astronomy, including planetariums and science centers.　　The course also walks you through free sky simulation software, teaching you to control field of view, zoom, and star catalogs, and to understand how programs like Celestia model the sky, the Earth, and time itself, down to leap seconds.

From there the course moves further afield into radio astronomy: how Karl Jansky first detected radio waves from the Milky Way, how Grote Reber built a radio telescope in his own backyard, and how interferometry and aperture synthesis let astronomers link telescopes across the world. You will meet the objects radio astronomy revealed that optical telescopes cannot see: pulsars, quasars, radio galaxies, and the black hole at the center of our galaxy.

The course finishes with white dwarfs, the dense, cooling remains of stars like the Sun. You will learn what holds them up against collapse, how they cool and fade, and what recent discoveries about metal-rich white dwarfs and variable white dwarfs tell us about their history.

This course is for beginners who want to know what they are looking at, whether from a backyard or a dark sky site. It asks only that you know what a telescope is. Each section builds on the last, moving from simple naked-eye observing to binoculars, telescopes, software, and finally the science behind what you see.

• Find constellations and the pole star using a chart
• Tell planets from stars and follow the Moon's phases
• Use binoculars to find star clusters and the Andromeda Galaxy
• Choose a first telescope and understand GOTO and setting circles
• Explore sky simulation software, radio astronomy, and white dwarfs