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| Hello, everyone, I recently got together with friends and we started talking about school and college, and as it turned out, not everyone had astronomy classes. From my memories, we had astronomy only one semester (but it was one of my favorite subjects) I wonder if you had similar subjects/electives? |
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| I had a one-semester astronomy course in high school which really cemented my interest in astronomy and astrophotography. The teacher was a seasoned astro imager who taught us different types of scope, filters, and even walked us through processing in PS and Nebulosity. The school had a C14 but at the time I was there the only camera was an old Canon DSLR. Shortly after I left they upgraded to a QSI CCD. Unfortunately the astronomy program was completely suspended a few years later. |
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Back when I was in high school we didn’t have “astronomy” courses per-say only Science and from my memory it was only a couple of chapters and moved onto another branch of the sciences. Any college classes I took was geared towards the trades so it didn’t come as an option for me. Dale |
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| I took astronomy classes to satisfy some non-major requirements in college. My school has a well-respected astronomy department and I tried to take as many classes as I could. They were really well taught and I probably should have just pursued a minor in astronomy. |
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Nothing. Just nothing. School's focus was the Roman Empire, Soccer, and also the Mediaeval dark ages, and battlefields. I also remember a certain Tutmosis (it sounded like Tutmosis), perhaps someone of the Egyptian era. Oh yes, I must say, there was that memorable day in the month of june of the year 1980 when we went to the planetarium of Brussels (the Heizel). The pupils wanted to know several facts about the circumstances in the dome of the planetarium, because they knew I was a nocturnal sky watcher. They ask'd me all sorts of related questions. What they really wanted to know was... how dark it was inside the dome, because... the girls were much more... eh... touchable in utter darkness. They (the macho-men) were not-at-all interested in the projection of the eighty-eight constellations on the concave inner surface of the dome, nay... they wanted... (sigh) (...). By the way, have you ever visited the Wikipedia article of (sir) Patrick Moore? (the British astronomer of the BBC-TV program The Sky at Night). He said that school is the most unfavourable place to get interested in astronomy, because when pupils feel that it is part of the schoolish system, they don't care a bit. It must come from the inside (your own individual intelligence and intuitive way of thinking). School can't start that kind of intuitive individual thinking, because that's the first thing they want to eliminate! (appear and sound intellectual, not intelligent). |
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In HS I took an astronomy course for one of my sciences credits. We didn't have telescopes or anything, but we went into the formation of the universe, solar systems, stars, planets etc and learned the math behind calculating the motion of orbital bodies, that kind of thing. One cool thing though, is that the class partnered with NASA and ASU to add an image target to the Mars Odyssey Spacecraft to get a high resolution image of a new part of the red planet. After a few months we got neat little posters of the newly captured image (If I remember right, about half of the image was new data): https://viewer.mars.asu.edu/viewer/themis#P=V58917005&T=2 |
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I am a retired physics teacher in the UK. There used to be astronomy sections of the physics courses that 16 year olds studied (GCSE). This mainly focused on the history of astronomy: Ptolemy, Galileo, Copernicus etc., and the physics behind the motion of the stars planets etc. At Advanced Level (16-18 year olds) Physics courses have various astrophysics options available that were very popular when I was teaching. I understand that there are now astronomy GCSEs available, but they still concentrate on the physics, rather than any observational work. I organised and ran various after school societies and clubs where we were able to make observations starting with binoculars, and then on to various types and size of telescope. When I lived in Marlborough I had access to the public school's (Marlborough College where the Princess of Wales among others studied) observatory which housed a 10" (2500mm) refractor. If I remember correctly it had a focal length of around 4m! It seems that observational astronomy is sadly lacking wherever you are in the world. |
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Astronomy and mathematics are too much seen as "one and the same thing", as if one can't observe the starry sky without several preceding years of being a "professor of mathematics" (read: the Einstein syndrome). Some people (mostly universitarians) are pleased when others (the so-called uneducated ones, or the "common people") find astronomy "too difficult" to comprehend. They (the stiff-upperlip'd professors) say: "Mmmm, yes, you should know all about mathematics before you start watching the nocturnal sky through telescopes". Well, I say, as uneducated harbour labourer (!): "Dear people, if you want to do something in (or with) astronomy, it (astronomy) is a very broad subject, for example, you don't need mathematics when you collect the names and nicknames of astronomical objects beyond the solar system, like I do since the early eighties". See also the volume The Shooting Star by Hergé (the adventures of Tintin). In this album the readers can see Tintin standing in an astronomical observatory. At a table nearby the telescope, some professors are "in deep thoughts" to figure out the strange behaviour of a mysterious bright star which appeared in the nocturnal sky. Their heads (of the professors) are surrounded by all sorts of mathematical symbols (typical for the way astronomy is depicted) (in other words: TOO difficult for common people to comprehend). Those days at school, and on the workfloor... Being a kid who was interested in space, astronomy, spaceflight, was like: "He want to be seen as a professor", and/or... "He's a freak". Kids with a certain feeling for astronomical topics are still seen as "weird" or "nuts as a professor" (the Julius Kelp syndrome). Frequently heard: "Say, you brave astronomer, have you ever observed the undressed lower sections of a woman?" (that typical babble on the workfloor) (I can fill whole chapters of the things I heard). |
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Nothing in high school. Back in those days (the 60's) in a small town we were lucky to have a decent science course.  In undergrad college (U of Mn) there was a general astronomy course that I took. It was one of those hugely popular courses that you needed an early registration for because it filled up within the first day every quarter. The prof was a Latvian astronomer named Karlis Kaufmanis and was one of those guys that was not just educational but entertaining (and his accent was great!  ).Karlis Kaufmanis As a side note, when I went on to graduate studies, his wife was an instructor there (not astronomy). I also know two Astrobin members that are friends of mine who teach imaging and astronomy related college courses. |
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In High School, there might have been a brief mention of Astronomy in our freshman, Earth Sciences course ... but in my senior year, I did teach a week-long class in Astronomy (where I brought my rig in and among other Astro related topics, discussed telescopes, etc.). As an Astrophysics major in my first year of college, it was mostly Physics and Math .... |
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At the high school level, you are mostly stuck with whatever your local school district offers. At the college level, if you want astronomy, you go to a school with an astronomy program. I first got interested in astronomy in elementary school and eventually went to the University of Arizona to study astronomy--partially based on the strength of their program. My first freshman astronomy class must have had 200+ students and the professor opened the class by asking how many of us were astronomy majors. Probably around 150 hands went up. He surveyed the room and said, "I want all of you to look around at all of the hands and I want to tell you that there will only be 12-15 of you who graduate with a degree in astronomy. This degree is about math and physics; not astrology or looking through telescopes." The class size dropped about 60 within two weeks and sure enough by the time I finished my degree (with a double major in physics) four years later there were only about 12 of us left. We had one single field trip to Kitt Peak to look through a moderately large scope (maybe 30" or so) even though there had been a 16" scope in the observatory on campus that we walked past every day on our way to classes. None of the classes involved sensors, optics, or anything that had anything to do with telescopes or imaging. It was all physics and math, although I do recall class subjects covering HR diagrams, stellar evolution, coordinate systems, orbital mechanics, and photometry. There might have been a general "non-math" astronomy course available as an elective but as a major, I never paid any attention to it. For me, the best part of my astronomy education was the gear, which is why I ultimately went on to study optics in grad school. John |
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I'm one of those who knows nothing of High School (it never happened to me). I was a bad and troublesome pupil (too much daydreaming of space, spaceflight, space movies, space music, space girls, space paintings and illustrations, spaceflight toys, etcetera...). Danny, are you somewhere in space again? I could say that, after my troublesome schoolyears, I walk on some sort of pretty unknown sideway (my rare astronomy related hobby, collecting nomenclature of deepsky objects), instead of the highway of pure astronomy (telescopic nocturnal sky observing, astrophotography, etc...). Frequently heard: He does everything in a different way, he's not like everybody. Well, I'm not a serial product! Perhaps interesting to know: around the year 2002 I was a frequent contributor in the... blog (or something like that) of astronaut Edgar D. Mitchell (the lunar module pilot of Apollo 14). I ask'd him all sorts of lunar questions and came up with the most unusual topics (mostly related to mysteries of mankind and science). I wrote a lot, in those days. He told me that I was too much concentrated on writing and asking unusual questions. Mmmmm... (...), I wanted to get the answer to that big question which was also ask'd by Charles Ives in his The Unanswered Question. |
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I was able to take two astronomy classes (stellar and solar) to fulfill my science electives. Interestingly, they were offered by the local community college and the credits transferred to my 4 year school. The community college even had a couple of CPC 1100s on an observation deck. My professor taught at both the community college and UT. His research time was/is at the McDonald observatory. Sometimes I feel like I missed a calling in regards to astronomy.. but I take comfort in that it's an enjoyable hobby. |
