Introductory Astronomy Complete University Course - Telescopes: the Tools of Astronomy

This is the fifth lecture series of my complete online introductory undergraduate college course. This video series was used at William Paterson University and CUNY Hunter in online classes as well as to supplement in-person course material. Notes and links are present in the videos at the start of each lecture. 0:00:00 - lecture 1: Refraction and Reflection 0:15:30 - lecture 2: Angular Resolution and Seeing 0:37:09 - lecture 3: Plate Scale, Focal Ratio and Magnification 0:53:08 - lecture 4: Imaging with CCDs 1:05:03 - lecture 5: Big Telescopes and High-Resolution 1:41:20 - lecture 6: Radio Telescopes 2:01:43 - lecture 7: Space-Based Telescopes 2:32:31 - lecture 8: All Sky Astronomical Surveys In the first lecture, Refraction and Reflection, I discussed the obvious point that all telescopes rely on some ability to focus light to a point. The two ways are refraction and reflection. I'll describe what they are in the context of telescopes. Next, I go over angular resolution and seeing. A key aspect of telescopes is their angular resolution. I talk about what makes up the concept of angular resolution and seeing. From her, I go on to focal ratio, magnification, plate scale, and related ideas. After that, I chat about the nature of how images are created digitally. We look at it from a hardware point of view, and we see that the current way of doing images relies on tiny boxes. Now that we know how they work, we'll take a look at big telescopes around the world and in space. This is meant as a basic introduction to some of the greatest resources ever constructed. I'm showing off their websites and what the instruments look like. After that, we'll learn about radio telescopes, what they do, what their function is, and some of the major radio facilities around the world. We also examine angular resolution and the need for interferometry in radio telescopes. We'll also lament the loss of Arecibo. From there, we go on to some of the more prominent space-based observatories, what they see, and how they do what they do. We'll learn about JWST, and far behind it is.... )-; Last, what can they see when they work well? All Sky Astronomical Surveys. I'll talk about the nature of full-sky surveys. It is highly instructive to make maps of the entire sky, just like it's important to make maps of our spherical Earth. We look at many wavelength bands and how the sky looks at all those wavelengths.