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What Your Astronomy Textbook Won’t Tell You
© 2002 Norman Sperling. All rights reserved.
Paperback 978-0913399-04-0. $24.95 + postage; to California, +sales tax.
I taught intro-astro courses a great many times from 1968 to 2022. After mastering the information, and finding good ways to convey it, I left the basics to the textbook, and taught enrichments and extensions beyond the very basics. These enrichments, collected here, will broaden and elaborate the understanding of anybody who has taken such a course, and any serious amateur astronomer.
For students and amateur astronomers seeking enrichment; for grads seeking questions to pursue.
Table of Contents
1: BEGINNINGS
1 Foreword: A Beautiful 4-Minute Universe, by David H. Levy
4 Make Textbooks Make Sense
15 How Does Nature Work? How Does Science Work?
15 Some Scientific Processes, by Brad Schaefer
21 Exploratory Science
22 Coming to Terms With Astronomy
23 12 Bad Words, by David Morrison
2: SKY MOTIONS
29 Bloopers: Sky Motions
31 From Celestial Spheres to Armillaries, Astrolabes, and Clocks
34 Wondering About Wandering
36 Debunk: The Pull of the Planets
38 Debunk: Horoscopes: Believe Them or Not, by Heather Leswing
42 Debunk: Horoscopes Flunk Test
46 Debunk: Planets Out of Nowhere
50 Oxymoron: Quarter Moon, by Brad Schaefer
51 Oxymoron: Waning Crescent
52 Bloopers: Copernicus
52 The Theory is Wrong, But Handy
54 Bloopers: Figuring Out Planetary Motion
54 Bloopers: Kepler’s Laws
56 Oxymoron: Laws of Planetary Motion
56 Bloopers: “According to Newton, How Does Gravity Work?”
61 Getting the Slant on Obliquity, by John Westfall
62 Unknown: Venus Spins Backwards, Uranus Spins Sideways, and Triton Orbits Backwards
63 Bloopers: Eclipses and Such
63 Sperling’s 8-Second Law
3: THE SOLAR SYSTEM
67 Bloopers: The Solar System
68 Reset Mindset: Comparative Planetology
72 Bloopers: Impacts
72 Unknown: Central Peaks
73 Bloopers: Surface Processes
73 Reset Mindset: Types of Meteorites
75 Heavy Metals in Planet Cores
76 The Difference Between an Asteroid and a Meteoroid
77 Bloopers: Venus
78 Right/Wrong: The Hadley Vortex
79 Bloopers: Planet Earth
80 Bloopers: Mars
80 Unknown: Mars’s Spiral Polar Cap and Flashes
81 Blooper: Gas Giants
81 Oxymoron: Frozen Gases
81 Unknown: How Old is Jupiter’s Great Red Spot?
82 Unknown: The Gas Giants’ Stripes
83 Blooper: Io
83 Right/Wrong: Volcano Seen on Edge of Moon
85 Bloopers: Comets
86 Debunk: Putting Worlds In Collision in its Place
87 Unknown: The Pingoes of Procellarum
88 Bloopers: The Outer Planets
89 Reset Mindset: Pluto and Planethood
92 Reset Mindset: Apples, Oranges, Rocks, and Clouds
93 Unknown: Planetary Magnetic Fields
94 Debunk: Was the Loch Ness Monster an Aurora?
99 Bloopers: Conditions Life Likes
99 Reset Mindset: Habitats for ET
101 Unknown: Inside Gas Balls
103 The Meanings of “Metals”
4: THE STARS
105 Bloopers: The Sun
106 How Prominences Come and Go
106 Unknown: The Sun
107 Oxymoron: The Solar Constant
107 Oxymoron: Solar Cosmic Rays
108 Bloopers: Stars
110 Debunk: Buying a Star, by Bill McClain, Jim Craig, and Bob Martino
118 The Dim, The Weak, and the Ugly
121 Graph: The Brightness Careers of Stars
123 Giants, Dwarfs, and White Main Sequence Stars
124 As We Learn More About Variable Stars, Textbooks Tell Less
125 Multiple Stars Pair Off
126 Oxymoron: Atomic Fission
127 Table: Where Elements Come From
127 Fusion Confusion: A Burning Problem
128 Reset Mindset: Quorbits, by Chris Anderson
128 Oxymoron: Forbidden Lines
129 Oxymoron: The Anomalous Zeeman Effect
130 Unknown: Unidentified Spectral Lines
131 Oxymoron: Black Body Radiation
131 Bloopers: The Pillars in the Eagle Nebula
135 Table: Nebulae Contain
136 Reset Mindset: Nebulous Categories
140 Bloopers: Stardeath
141 Oxymoron: Nova
142 Unknown: Magnetic Fields, by Brad Schaefer
143 Bloopers: Black Holes
143 Black Hole Momentum
144 Unknown: Inside Black Holes
5: GALAXIES AND COSMOLOGY
145 Bloopers: The Milky Way
146 The Meanings of the Milky Way
146 Bloopers: Galaxies
147 Reset Mindset: Hubble’s Tuning Fork, by Brad Schaefer
148 Reset Mindset: What Shape is M 31?
150 Reset Mindset: What is a Galaxy “Spiral Arm”?
152 Unknown: A Black Eye for Dust
152 Unknown: Why No Giant or Dwarf Spirals?
153 Unknown: How Much are Giant Ellipticals Mergers?
153 Unknown: Stellar Populations 3, 1.5, and 0
154 Table: Galaxy Types and Populations
155 FFNs, LBBs, and LBMs
156 Oxymoron: The Missing-Mass Problem
157 Bloopers: Active Galaxies
158 Oxymoron: Radio-Quiet Quasars
158 Bloopers: Cosmology
160 Oxymoron: The Hubble Constant
161 Unknown: Did The Big Bang Make Mini-Black Holes?
APPENDIX
163 Project Suggestions
168 Projects That Address How Science Works, by Brad Schaefer
175 Index