Lectures at JPL

The von Kármán Lecture Series at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory is available at JPL. The videos of 2008 lectures are available for download now. In addition, you'll find the January 2009 lecture, "Spirit and Opportunity: The Corps of Discovery for Mars Rolls On", by Steve Squires.


Also available is the list of scheduled lectures for 2009. For lifelong learners interested in astronomy and our exploration of the universe, these full-length lectures are a treasure trove of current and historical information

Seeing in the Dark

The Astronomical Society of the Pacific has a great e-newsletter called The Universe in the Classroom. The archive contains a lot of good overview material on astronomy topics.

The Fall 2007, Special Issue: Seeing in the Dark, is about the PBS special done by Timothy Ferris which aired on September 19, 2007. In the program Ferris explores amateur astronomy and highlights some of the contributions that those amateurs have made and are making to our body of astronomical knowledge.

The PBS companion website, in addition to information about the program, the people behind it and its filming, has several study topics listed, appropriately enough, under "Astronomy Topics."

It's a good starting point for lifelong learners wanting to add amateur astronomy to their learning projects.

Astrobiology at University of Hawaii

This Spring 2008 course, A281 -- Astrobiology, taught by astronomer Karen Meech, is a great course, with syllabus, lecture slides, handouts and homeworks available for download.

The textbook used is Life in the Universe, 2nd edition, by Bennett and Shostak.

The extensive handouts include a 79-page Astrobiology Primer: An Outline of General Knowledge--Version 1, 2006.

Professor Meech is a working astronomer, involved, with the 8th NASA Discovery mission, Deep Impact and many other projects.

You may also want to check out the Institute for Astonomy and the Astrobiology Institute at the University of Hawaii.

Astronomy Lecture Podcasts

The Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures presented at Foothill College are available as audio podcasts. You can get some of them as video from iTunes. These lectures have been given since 1999, but only 2 sets of podcasts are accessible, twelve lectures. It appears that this year's lectures will be added as they occur.

The lectures include many very interesting topics by notable speakers. The speaker on Oct. 4, 2006, Dr. Alex Filippenko (U. of California, Berkeley): Dark Energy and the Runaway Universe will be familiar. Everyday Scholar profiled his course, Astro C10 / LS C70U Introduction to General Astronomy, at Berkeley, on August 3, 2008.

Thanks to the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, Foothill College and Andrew Fraknoi for this great resource for lifelong learners.

Introduction to General Astronomy

Alex Filippenko says that his class, Astro C10 / LS C70U Introduction to General Astronomy, is a description of the entire cosmos. He also says that this is one of the golden ages of astronomy because there are so many discoveries being made.

This is an excellent overview of the universe and introduction to Astronomy.

This course has video podcasts, as well as mp3's. Each video presents excellent slides in addition to the instructor's powerful lecture. This is one case where you can say, "He knows his astronomy so thoroughly that he wrote the book." Literally, he is the co-author, with Jay M. Pasachoff, of the textbook used in this course, The Cosmos: Astronomy in the New Millennium.

The companion website to this book provides some additional study materials, plus a link out to Jay Pasachoff's Astronomy 101 The Cosmos course at Williams College. I just discovered this additional resource while preparing for this post, so I have not yet looked at any of these videos. This will be interesting to see the difference in the presentations of these two professors. Let's rethink this--after further review, it appears both of them may be doing these lectures. I'll update this post after I have time to explore these lectures.

So far, I have not found a course website for either of these.