I’ve been asked in the past to teach people about astronomy over the internet, and I do not have the time to do that. I do, however, have the time to upload all of my astronomy notes, various charts and graphs, and one particularly heart wrenching lecture about global warming via my very passionate astrophysics professor, and possibly in the future even lecture slides. All for free. To dropbox. Right here.

The content follows the book The Essential Cosmic Perspective by Bennett, but can be adapted for any intro level course 

The notes include:

1. Developing perspective
   
2. Key concepts for astronomy
   
3. Formation of the solar system, analysis of the planets as well as other small bodies
   
4. Stars, their formation, classification, and death
   
5. Galaxies, their formation, classification, dark matter, dark energy, and the fate of the universe
   
6. The Drake Equation
   

Other content:

1. Graphs
   
2. Charts
   
3. Helpful graphics
   
4. The Most Important Lecture
   
5. The Most Important Lecture Slides

I am also willing to update this as I find more things to add, possibly interesting articles, videos, etc. So if you find something interesting to share, send me a link!

The thing that makes me sad about people that are gonna live on Mars is that their internet is gonna suck. Even if we found a way to send data at the speed of light (or as close as possible without breaking the laws of physics), it would take an average of 12.5 minutes for a signal to go from Mars to Earth. That makes me sad. Trans-planetary internet is gonna suck.

I help grade work for an Astronomy for Education Majors class and let me tell you nothing is more fucking terrifying than a future science teacher thinking all of the planets and the sun orbit mars

Been getting a lot of asks about “NASA finding a parallel universe” or whatever and let me break it down.

It’s 90% sensationalism. ANITA, a detector in Antarctica has recently picked up some strange signals. The signals indicate that a very high energy particle (the neutrino) had passed through the earth without interacting with anything, something unexpected of a high energy particle.

So, here come the weird ideas. Scientists try to come up with ways of modifying our understanding of physics to make these detections more plausible. SOME of these require bizarre beyond the standard model ideas, like the one in the news. However there are much more likely answers, such as a common function of how physics normally works (won’t go into details here, but here’s a paper on it https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.01737) or simply a systematic explanation, like the signals bouncing off weird features in the ice and distorting the signal. Here’s another article: https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.091102

Conclusion? The news relies on article clicks and outrageous claims get those clicks.