Online astronomy course
December 19th, 2006I ran across some really good webcasts of an astronomy course at Berkeley (go bears!):
Astro C10 / LS C70U Introduction to General Astronomy | Fall 2006
This prof, Alex Filippenko has a real gift for teaching; he’s received a boatload of awards and watching his lectures makes it clear why.
I’ve been through about maybe 7 of them in a few days. It’s an overview course, no complex math or anything, so you can pretty much just cruise along. (I’ve also been watching the chem1a course, which you definitely can’t cruise through).
Accessible as it is, he covers really interesting stuff, which I never happened to study in school. Did you know about the green flash at sunset? I didn’t.
The web rules.
update: dammit … they took it down. ☹
update: undammit! It was just archived:
UC Berkeley Webcasts | Video and Podcasts: Astro C10 / LS C70U
Probably the one thing I did know - there is a film by Rohmer with that title, German Das gruene Leuchten, French possibly l’eclair vert, not sure. Very watchable film about a girl who goes on holiday and eventually does meet someone and does see the green light.
- Margaret @ 19 December 2006Ah, how interesting Margaret. I found an article about the film on Wikipedia: The Green Ray.
It seems that there are at least 3 phrases to describe the phenomenon: “emerald flash,” “green flash,” and “green ray.”
They give the French title as Le Rayon vert.
Thanks for stopping by! ☺
- pat @ 21 December 2006