Night School
A cardiologist's astronomy degree, one course at a time — posted here because a public ledger is harder to abandon, and because someone else may be weighing the same enrollment.
Decades after the last formal classroom, I enrolled at Arizona State to study astronomy properly. The reason is in the backyard: the observatory kept producing questions its operator couldn't answer. Why a globular cluster's stars share a birthday. What a light curve is actually confessing. Why the hydrogen in my narrowband filters glows at exactly the wavelength it does. Photography without physics is stamp collecting, and I wanted the physics.
This page is the running ledger — courses, grades, and where each one points the telescopes. It stays honest: the good marks and, should they come, the humbling ones.
Currently Enrolled
AST 111 — Introduction to Solar Systems Astronomy
Yes — 112 before 111. I am reading the universe back to front: galaxies and cosmology first, our own neighborhood second. The registrar permits it, and there is a certain honesty in working from the largest scales down to the ground beneath the tripod.
The Transcript
| Course | Title | Term | Units | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AST 112 | Introduction to Stars, Galaxies, and Cosmology — structure and evolution of stars, star clusters, galaxies, cosmology. Stellar classification, variable stars and light-curve photometry, galactic structure, and lab practicals in Stellarium. | Summer 2026 | 4 | A |
Where It's Pointed
The coursework is not an end in itself — it feeds the instruments. The variable-star unit becomes an Algol photometry campaign this fall, measured in AstroImageJ, with observations contributed to the AAVSO. The stellar-classification work becomes a slitless spectroscopy program — a Star Analyser 100 diffraction grating, first light on Vega, working toward reading stars by their spectra from a Florida backyard. Somewhere past all of it sits the long-game target: understanding, not just imaging, the integrated flux nebula behind the Pleiades.
Follow along. The next entry posts when the registrar does.
Night School takes correspondence: [email protected]