Expanding

My knowledge of Astronomy is already expanding! The S194 officially started 5 days ago, but as the course book arrived three weeks ago I started reading then. So, according to the study calendar, I am now at the point where I ought to be on 4th December. That's good. This is the first of the OU short courses that I have done - and it differs from the other L1, L2, and L3 courses in two ways - firstly it is all studied online (and books of course), there is no assigned tutor, there are no face to face tutorials, secondly, the course has two different completion dates - this means that you can study it over 2 months (if you can spare 8 hours a week) or over 5 months (if you can only manage a couple of hours). Well, since the whole point of me doing this course is to get back into the swing of studying and ensuring that I can manage my time I have elected to do it in two months.

The EMA (what we used to call the ECA - but courses are now called Modules) has been made available, so I have already completed the first of the 6 questions (first question was mainly about the sun and absorbtion spectrums). Tonight I shall probably make a start on the second question - which looks to be about the apparent movement of stars across the sky and with angular seperation.

I have also found a couple of interesting astronomy podcasts:

astronomy.ohio-state
astronomycast