Astronomy Archives - Projeda

Chapter 4 — Earth, Moon, and Sky [OpenStax]

Chapter Outline Thinking Ahead If Earth’s orbit is nearly a perfect circle (as we saw in earlier chapters), why is it hotter in summer and colder in winter in many places around the globe? And why are the seasons in […]

[4.1] Earth and Sky [OpenStax]

Learning Objectives By the end of this section, you will be able to: In order to create an accurate map, a mapmaker needs a way to uniquely and simply identify the location of all the major features on the map, […]

[3.6] Gravity with More Than Two Bodies

Learning Objectives By the end of this section, you will be able to: Until now, we have considered the Sun and a planet (or a planet and one of its moons) as nothing more than a pair of bodies revolving […]

[3.5] Motions of Satellite and Spacecraft [OpenStax]

Learning Objectives By the end of this section, you will be able to: Newton’s universal law of gravitation and Kepler’s laws describe the motions of Earth satellites and interplanetary spacecraft as well as the planets. Sputnik, the first artificial Earth […]

[3.4] Orbit’s In The Solar System [OpenStax]

Learning Objectives By the end of this section, you will be able to: Recall that the path of an object under the influence of gravity through space is called its orbit, whether that object is a spacecraft, planet, star, or […]

[3.3] Newton’s Universal Law of Gravitation [OpenStax]

Learning Objectives By the end of this section, you will be able to: Newton’s laws of motion show that objects at rest will stay at rest and those in motion will continue moving uniformly in a straight line unless acted […]

[3.2] Newton’s Great Synthesis [OpenStax]

Learning Objectives By the end of this section, you will be able to: It was the genius of Isaac Newton that found a conceptual framework that completely explained the observations and rules assembled by Galileo, Brahe, Kepler, and others. Newton […]

The Laws of Planetary Motion

At around the same time that Galileo was observing the heavens with his newly designed telescope and conducting experiments with falling bodies (that would lay the foundations for Classical Mechanics and Gravitation) in the early 1600’s, two other scientists were […]

Chapter III — Orbits and Gravity

In the last 400 years since the mathematical, physical, modular, and theoretical foundations of Modern Astronomy were laid by giants such as Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton we have made extreme progress in our understanding of the cosmos. However, […]

The Birth of Astronomy — Problem Set

Glossary accelerate/acceleration — to change velocity; to speed up, slow down, or change direction apparent magnitude — a relative measure of how bright a star looks in the sky (i.e. how bright it appears to be from our perspective on […]