Observing the heavens: Celestial sights for everyone. ; A grand tour of the cosmos. The rainbow connection. Sunrise, sunset. Bright objects in the night sky. Fainter phenomena in the night sky. Our sky through binoculars and telescopes. The celestial sphere. The reason for the seasons. Lunar phases and eerie lunar eclipses. Glorious total solar eclipses. More eclipse tales. Early studies of the solar system.
The geocentric universe. Galileo and the Copernican revolution. Refinements to the heliocentric model. On the shoulders of giants. Surveying space and time. Scale models of the universe. Observing the heavens : Basic concepts and tools. Light: the supreme informant. The wave-particle duality of light. The colors of stars. The fingerprints of atoms. Modern telescopes. A better set of eyes.
Contents of the Universe : Our solar system. Our sun, the nearest star. The Earth, third rock from the sun. Our moon, Earth's nearest neighbor. Mercury and Venus. Of Mars and Martians. Jupiter and its amazing moons. Magnificent Saturn. Uranus and Neptune, the small giants. Pluto and its cousins. Asteroids and dwarf planets. Comets: gorgeous primordial snowballs. Catastrophic collisions.
The formation of planetary systems. Contents of the universe : Other planetary systems. The quest for other planetary systems. Extra-solar planets galore! (ca. 31 min.) ; Life beyond the Earth. The search for extraterrestrials. Special relativity and interstellar travel. Contents of the universe : Stars and their lives. Stars: distant suns. The intrinsic brightnesses of stars. The diverse sizes of stars. Binary stars and stellar masses. Star clusters, ages, and remote distances. How stars shine: nature's nuclear reactors.
Solar neutrinos: probes of the sun's core. Brown dwarfs and free-floating planets. Our sun's brilliant future. White dwarfs and nova eruptions. Exploding stars: celestial fireworks. White dwarf supernovae: stealing to explode. Contents of the universe: Stellar explosions and black holes. Core-collapse supernovae: gravity wins. The brightest supernova in nearly 400 years. The corpses of massive stars. Einstein's general theory of relativity. Warping of space and time. Black holes: abandon hope, ye who enter.
The quest for black holes. Imagining the journey to a black hole. Wormholes: gateways to other universes? Quantum physics and black-hole evaporation. Enigmatic gamma-ray bursts. Birth cries of black holes. Contents of the universe : The Milky Way and other galaxies. Our home: the Milky Way Galaxy. Structure of the Milky Way Galaxy. Other galaxies: "Island universes". The dark side of matter. Cosmology: The universe as a whole. Cosmic expansion and distant galaxies. Cosmology: the really big picture. Expansion of the universe and the big bang.
Searching for distant galaxies. The evolution of galaxies. Active galaxies and quasars. Cosmic powerhouses of the distant past. Supermassive black holes. Feeding the monster. Cosmology: The universe as a whole. The structure and evolution of the universe. The paradox of the dark night sky. The age of the universe. When geometry is destiny. The mass density of the universe. Einstein's biggest blunder? The afterglow of the big bang.
Ripples in the cosmic background radiation. The stuff of the cosmos. Dark energy: quantum fluctuations? Dark energy: quintessence? Grand unification & theories of everything. Searching for hidden dimensions. Cosmology: The universe as a whole. The birth of the cosmos, and other frontiers. The shape, size, and fate of the universe. In the beginning. The inflationary universe. The ultimate free lunch? A universe of universes. Reflections on life and the cosmos.
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