Reading the Night Sky: A Beginner's Astronomy Journey

What's inside

1. Level 1: The Great Turning Wheel of NightFree
   You will watch the whole sky wheel slowly around a fixed point above the pole as the Earth spins, and learn to use the Plough's pointer stars to find Polaris, the Pole Star, with the Southern Cross and its pointers guiding southern observers to the starless south celestial pole.
2. Level 2: Constellations, Asterisms and Star-HoppingFree
   You will learn the difference between the 88 official constellations and the familiar patterns called asterisms, then hop from star to star across the sky the way skywatchers have done for thousands of years.
3. Level 3: The Year's Slow Parade of Stars
   You will discover why each season brings its own constellations, as the Earth's orbit carries the Sun along the zodiac and stars rise about four minutes earlier every night.
4. Level 4: The Moon's Changing Face
   You will follow the Moon around its month-long orbit, from thin evening crescent to full Moon and back, and see why its phases come from sunlight falling on a world that only ever turns one face toward us.
5. Level 5: Shadows in Space: Eclipses
   You will learn how the Moon and Earth throw shadows across each other to make solar and lunar eclipses, and why the Moon's tilted orbit means they do not happen every month.
6. Level 6: The Tilted Earth and the Seasons
   You will find out that the seasons come from the Earth's 23.5-degree tilt, not its distance from the Sun, and track the Sun's changing path through solstices and equinoxes.
7. Level 7: The Wanderers: Why Planets Roam
   You will learn why the planets drift against the background stars along the ecliptic, why they sometimes seem to loop backward, and how to tell a planet from a star with your own eyes.
8. Level 8: Light, Colour and the Spectrum
   You will split starlight into its rainbow and learn how a star's colour shows its temperature, while dark and bright spectral lines reveal which elements it contains.
9. Level 9: Parallax: The First Rung of the Ladder
   You will measure the distances to nearby stars the way astronomers first did, by catching the tiny shift in their positions as the Earth swings around the Sun.
10. Level 10: Standard Candles: Measuring the Deep Sky
    You will climb past the reach of parallax using stars and explosions of known true brightness, such as Cepheid variables and Type Ia supernovae, to measure distances across the universe.
11. Level 11: Stellar Nurseries: How Stars Are Born
    You will travel into glowing clouds of gas and dust where gravity squeezes matter until nuclear fusion lights up a new star, and then look at young star clusters you can find for yourself.
12. Level 12: The Long Life of a Star
    You will learn how a star's mass decides how long it lives, how it sits on the main sequence of the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram, and how it swells into a red giant when its core runs out of hydrogen.
13. Level 13: Stellar Deaths: Dwarfs, Pulsars, Black Holes
    You will follow stars to their dramatic ends, from gentle planetary nebulae leaving white dwarfs behind to supernovae that forge neutron stars and black holes and scatter the elements we are made of.
14. Level 14: The Milky Way and the Realm of Galaxies
    You will discover that the misty band across a dark sky is the edge-on disc of our own spiral galaxy, and then reach beyond it to the Andromeda Galaxy and the countless other galaxies scattered through space.
15. Level 15: The Expanding Universe and the Big Bang
    You will see how the redshifted light of galaxies revealed a universe that is stretching, and weigh the evidence that it began in a hot, dense state about 13.8 billion years ago.
16. Level 16: Other Suns, Other Worlds: Exoplanets
    You will learn how astronomers have found more than six thousand planets orbiting other stars, by watching stars wobble, dim and bend light, and how they are starting to read the air of these distant worlds.
17. Level 17: Giant Eyes: Telescopes on Earth and in Space
    You will learn how telescopes gather and focus light, why some are built on high mountains and others sent into space, and how the James Webb Space Telescope looks in infrared from a million miles away.
18. Level 18: Shooting Stars, Comets and Satellites
    You will learn what meteors, comets and artificial satellites really are, and how to plan a night out to catch a meteor shower, track a comet or watch the International Space Station glide overhead.
19. Level 19: Dark Skies and Your First Instrument
    You will learn how light pollution steals the stars and how to fight back, then choose and use your first binoculars or small telescope with confidence.
20. Level 20: The Final Challenge: Reading the Whole Sky Exam
    You will bring the whole journey together by finding your way around the sky through the seasons and explaining, step by step, how astronomers learned the makeup, distances, life stories and history of everything you see.

Access

The first 2 levels are free with a free account. Every level, the podcast edition and the AI tutor come with All Access at £4.99/month or any Creator plan — see pricing.

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