Items in boldface type are vocabulary terms and key concepts. They can often be found in either boldface or italics in the textbook.

Chapter 1: Science and the Universe: A Brief Tour

Section 1.2 talks about the nature of science. Here are some basic things to know about this:

The scientific method begins with many __________ over a period of time
The two early models of the universe differed from each other in what main way?
What is a hypothesis?
What is the key thing that you have to be able to do to a hypothesis?
What do we mean when we say that astronomy is both an observational science and a historical science?

In section 1.5, we first learn about the concept of light travel time. Here are examples of the kinds of questions I might ask about this: (Note: these are just examples.)

What is the speed of light, in light years per year?
If an object (say, a star cluster or nebula) is 1000 light-years away, when will Earth-bound astronomers learn about a change in that object that occurs right now?
If you were in a galaxy 100 million light years away, and could somehow observe the Earth in detail, what would you see walking around on its surface? (I might have used this as an example in a lecture. Hint: This is around Dec. 25-26 on the "calendar" in Fig. 1.15.)
What is the advantage that astronomers get from light travel time? How is it useful to them? Why does this make them want bigger and bigger telescopes?

Next, we got an overview of the universe (Sec. 1.6). Here are the basics to know and understand:

What planet do we live on?
How could a space traveler easily tell our planet from the others in our solar system, just by looking at it?
What do we call our planet’s natural satellite?
In Fig. 1.8, what are the objects that are currently called planets, and what’s their order outward from the Sun? There are some other objects in this figure – what are they called? (You don’t have to memorize their names or order for this test.)
Make sure you’re clear on the difference between a solar system and a galaxy. What does a solar system have at its center? What is the name of the galaxy we live in?
What does our galaxy look like, as seen from here on Earth? (See Fig. 1.10 – this would be a good example of the kind of image that might show up in a slide question on the midterm or the final (See the practice test for examples of the different types of questions.)
What is the difference between a light-year and an astronomical unit? How is each one defined?
How do astronomers define the universe?
What is the nearest large galaxy to ours? (Being able to recognize a picture of it, like Fig. 1.13, and knowing that it probably looks a lot like our galaxy, might come in handy on a slide question.)

In Section 1.9, the authors compared the history of the universe to a calendar year (See Fig. 1.15) In this comparison, when (in the calendar year) did our solar system form? When did the dinosaurs appear? When did they become extinct? When did humans appear?

Chapter 2: Observing the Sky: The Birth of Astronomy

The first section, 2.1, has a lot of detailed information to know:

For starters, what do we mean by the celestial sphere? (In one of the lectures, I might have referred to the ancient model of the “Two-Sphere Universe”. This is basically the same thing shown in Fig. 2.3.)

In the online lectures, I probably used a program like Stellarium to demonstrate the apparent motions in the sky. (If we were in a face-to-face class at De Anza, I'd use the planetarium.) Here are things you should know and understand, based on the textbook and these demonstrations:

What do we mean by the apparent diurnal motion of the sky, and what do we mean by the apparent annual motions? (The book doesn’t define these right at the beginning of Chapter 2, but we probably spent a day on diurnal motions, and a day on annual motions, and defined them in class.)
What are the horizon and the zenith?
What is a celestial pole?
How many celestial poles are there, and which one do we see here in California?

What would look different about the sky if you were at different latitudes on the Earth? (And what does latitude mean, anyway? It’s defined in Section 2.1.)

Here are some good examples of this "latitude effect" to be able to visualize:

The sky as seen from: the Earth’s North Pole
The sky as seen from the Earth’s South Pole
The sky as seen from the Earth’s equator
The sky as seen from our latitude here in California
The sky as seen from a latitude in the Earth’s southern hemisphere, like Australia or South Africa.

(Fig. 2.5 will be worth studying closely, to help understand this "latitude effect".)

What do we call the star that currently appears very close to the north celestial pole?

How do astronomers use angles to measure the apparent distances between objects on the celestial sphere? (There’s an `Astronomy Basics’ box in the textbook about this.)

Next, here are some details to know about the apparent annual motions in the sky:

How do the constellations look different at different times of year?
How does the Sun appear to move, relative to the background stars?
What do we call the `band’ of constellations against which the Sun appears to move? (See Fig. 2.6.)

The line that runs right along the middle of this band is the Sun’s path during the apparent annual motion. What is its angle to the celestial equator? (There’s a figure in the textbook that shows this.)

As seen with the unaided eye, what is the difference between the “fixed stars” and the planets?

What’s the modern definition of a constellation? What’s the difference between a constellation and an asterism?

Next, in Section 2.2, we dealt with the origins of astronomy. Things to know:

What were two lines of evidence that Aristotle used, to demonstrate that the Earth is a sphere?
Why did Aristotle and other ancient thinkers reject Aristarchus’s proposal that the Earth might move around the Sun? (Make sure you understand what they meant by parallax, and why they thought it disproved the motion of the Earth.)
How did Eratosthenes measure the size of the Earth? (In class, we probably drew our own versions of Figs. 2.10 and 2.11, and went over them in some detail.)
What were the two big discoveries made by Hipparchus?
How does the apparent magnitude system work? (Hint: Why can it be so confusing for beginning astronomers to understand?)
What is the apparent motion we call precession? (There’s a chance we might have seen this demonstrated on the planetarium dome.)

Now for a big, important concept in the history of astronomy: The Ptolemaic model of the solar system:

First, what is retrograde motion? We probably spent some time demonstrating this on the planetarium dome.
How did the Ptolemaic model use epicycles, deferents, and equant points to explain things like retrograde motion? (See Fig. 2.14.)

In the box titled “Making Connections – Testing Astrology”, what did the statisticians find when they looked up the sun signs of people who re-enlisted in the Marines? Where these Marines more likely to have a particular sign? What happened when Geoffrey Dean reversed the astrological readings of 22 people? Did people think these `reversed’ readings still applied to them?

Section 2.4 gets us into the beginnings of modern astronomy:

What’s the difference between Copernicus’s heliocentric model of the solar system and the earlier geocentric model?

In a lecture, I probably made a big deal about the astronomical observations of Galileo. These had a lot to do with testing the heliocentric vs. geocentric models. Here are the main things to understand and know:

How did Galileo’s observations of the phases of Venus argue for a Sun-centered solar system? We probably spent a fair amount of time in class, making diagrams of this.
How did his discovery of the moons of Jupiter help argue for the heliocentric model?
Why did his observations of the Earth’s Moon argue against the Aristotelian/Ptolemaic model of the universe?
What did Galileo discover about the Milky Way – what is it really made of?

Chapter 3: Orbits and Gravity (Sections 3.1 through 3.5)

What sort of observations did Tycho Brahe make, that were important to Johannes Kepler?

Next, we dealt with Kepler, who figured out some very important things about the planets' orbits:

Make sure you know and understand these things about Kepler’s first two “laws”:

What is an ellipse?
What are the foci of an ellipse?
What's the semimajor axis of an ellipse?
What does it mean if an ellipse has a high eccentricity?
What do ellipses have to do with planetary motion?
Make sure you don't confuse the terms ellipse and eclipse.

Kepler's Second Law - Make sure you understand the following points:

What does the Second Law say?
Where, in its orbit, would an object be moving the fastest? Moving the slowest?

Kepler's Third Law - Make sure you understand the following points:

As you go farther from the Sun, what happens to the time that it takes a planet to orbit the Sun?
What does this imply about the speed at which, say, an outer planet is moving (relative to an inner one?)
Would a `year' on an inner planet (like Mercury) be longer or shorter than the Earth's year? How about for an outer planet (like Neptune)?

And, just to make sure you’re clear about it, what is an astronomical unit? And what is the Earth’s orbital period, measured in Earth years?

EXTRA CREDIT: Although no math is required in this class, you might get some extra points on the test if you can solve problems like the ones shown in Example 3.1, which is in Section 3.1.

Newton discovered three laws of motion that provided the foundation for understanding things like the orbits of planets around the Sun. There are a fair number of terms and details to keep straight when studying Newton. Here are some things to make sure you understand:

What is Newton's First Law? (Note: It's basically the same thing as one of Galileo's discoveries, which is described in the paragraph that begins `If an object is slid…’)

If an object is moving through space at a constant speed, in a straight line, what will happen to it, if no forces act on it? The textbook described Newton's laws of motion fairly briefly, but I may have made drawings in a lecture showing a spacecraft that has its motion changed by forces. If you have these drawings in your notes, it's well worth reviewing them in detail. Make sure you're clear on how forces are what cause changes in motion.

What's a specific term we used for a `change in motion'? In a lecture, I may have talked about how, in your car, you've got three controls for changing motion, rather than just the one that most people think of. In our drawings of the spacecraft, how did we show three different sorts of changes in motion?

What is Newton's Second Law? It may be easiest to think of it this way:

If we apply a larger force to an object, do we get a bigger change in motion, or a smaller one?

If we make an object more massive, will the same force cause a bigger change in motion, or a smaller change?

(Hint: Think about hitting a baseball with a bat. This causes the ball's motion to change. Think about how a harder hit, or a heavier ball, would lead to different scenarios for the ball's change in motion.)

What is Newton's Third Law? This is the one that people have most commonly heard expressed as a spoken or written phrase. Here's an example of something important to understand about the Third Law: How does it allow a rocket to work? Is it really necessary for the rocket's exhaust to hit something, in order for the rocket to move? Or can a rocket, floating in empty space, ignite its engine and start moving? How is the Third Law relevant here?

In addition to his three laws of motion, Newton also came up with a very important idea called universal gravitation. (It's sometimes called mutual gravitation, too.) What does this mean? For example, if you travel across the universe, are you ever `beyond' the gravitational pull of the Earth?

What does it mean to say that the law of mutual gravitation is an inverse square law?

EXTRA CREDIT: Although no math is required in this class, you can get some extra points on the test if you can solve problems like the ones shown in Example 3.4, which is in Section 3.3.

In Section 3.4, we start to get into the idea of orbits. First, here are some vocabulary terms to know:

Perihelion
Aphelion
Perigee
Apogee

Make sure you understand Newton's explanation of how orbits and orbital motion work. Figure 3.11 will be particularly important to understand here.

Make sure you understand why there is a certain orbital velocity for any given planet. In a lecture, I probably talked about orbits by using the example of a cannon shooting cannonballs from the top of a tall tower. (This is like the person firing bullets in Fig. 3.11a.) Fig. 3.11b shows this, too, but using the example of a tall mountain instead of a tall tower.

Here's an important point to be clear about: If you see an image of an astronaut floating `weightlessly' inside a spacecraft, what is really causing this? Have they really gone beyond the gravity of the Earth, as most people imagine?

How did astronomers use observations of Uranus's orbit to discover the planet Neptune? How was this discovery different from the way Uranus was discovered?

Chapter 4: Earth, Moon, and Sky

Section 4.1 was about locating positions on the (roughly spherical) Earth or on the (apparent) sphere of the sky. Make sure you understand how latitude and longitude work, and how declination and right ascension are similar to latitude and longitude

How did Foucault show that the Earth really rotates? (If you want to see one of these devices for yourself, and you're in the Bay Area, you could go to San Francisco and visit the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park.)

Next, in Section 4.2, we dealt with the seasons – this is one of the most misunderstood topics in all of science!

First, one of the most important points of all – are the seasons really caused by the Earth’s distance from the Sun? Three key pieces of evidence are discussed in Section 4.2. Make sure you know and understand these three things.

Next, what really DOES cause the seasons? Make sure you understand everything in Figures 4.5 through 4.9. This is really worth spending some time on!

Section 4.3 is about days and the calendar. Specific things to know:

What are the definitions of a solar day and a sidereal day? Which one is longer, and why? (Understanding Fig. 4.10 will be really useful here!) How much longer?
What would be inconvenient about using solar time? If you’re traveling quickly, such as on a train or plane, why is standard time so much easier to use than either apparent solar time or mean solar time? What don’t you have to do in such a situation, if you’re using standard time?
The most basic thing to know about astronomy and calendars: Are either of these two units (month, year) a whole number of days long? And if not, why is that inconvenient? What does the textbook mean by “not commensurable”? (see the end of the first paragraph of "The Challenge of the Calendar".)

Next, Chapter 4 tackles the phases of the Moon. Along with the seasons, this is ALSO one of the most mis-understood things in all of science!

Let’s start with what the phases look like. We’ll arbitrarily begin the cycle with “New Moon”, shown in Fig. 4.14. Now, here are specific things to know:

What are the names of the phases?
Make sure you know the order of the phases.
What does each phase look like, as seen from Earth?
What is the difference between a waxing Moon and a waning Moon?
What does a gibbous Moon look like? (I’ll assume everyone knows what a crescent Moon looks like.)
Where is the Moon, relative to the Sun, during the Full phase, or the New phase?
At what time of day or night does the Moon rise when it’s New or Full?

Now, for the BEST thing you can do for understanding Moon phases!... Be able to correctly sketch, label, and explain the “phase drawings” I went over in one of the lectures. These were our own versions of Figure 4.14, with some extra details added. If you could make one of these diagrams, accurately drawn, with all relevant details correctly labeled, then you’d be WAY ahead of the game!

What do we mean by the synchronous rotation of the Moon? How is this related to the terms “nearside” and “farside”?

Next, the textbook covered the tides in Section 4.6.

First, make sure what we mean by differential forces. A careful study of Fig. 4.16 (and the diagrams in your notes) will be very important here.

Next, how does the idea of differential forces lead to the TWO bulges in Fig. 4.17?

Finally, make sure you understand how the Earth’s rotation “underneath” the water bulges creates the ocean tides.

You can get an idea of what the tidal bulges look like by running this UNL animation:

Make sure you're clear on the difference between a solar eclipse and a lunar eclipse. In each case, which object is casting a shadow on which other object? What does each one look like, as seen from the Earth?

It's a good idea to know Figure 4.21 in detail. Here are some specific things to make sure you know:
Know which part of the diagram is the umbra.
Which parts of the diagram are the penumbra? (Hint: As we pointed out in class, it's not just region 4.)
What would the Sun look like as seen from each of the four regions? (In other words, memorize what diagrams 1 through 4 look like.)

What's the difference between a total solar eclipse and an annular solar eclipse? How are these different from a partial solar eclipse? (Note: This is essentially the same thing as understanding 4.21 and being able to re-draw it and explain it for a fellow student.)

Why is a total solar eclipse only visible within a narrow path of totality?

What would you see if you were observing a total solar eclipse? What is the corona?

(To get a better idea of what totality is like, you might want to check out a page of links I compiled, of photos and videos from the 2017 total eclipse. Also check out Nicolas Lefaudeux's wonderful images!)

Why can lunar eclipses be observed by more people than total solar eclipses? What makes the Moon look dark during such an eclipse?

What causes the "dull coppery red" color of the Moon during a total lunar eclipse?

Chapter 5: Radiation and spectra

What is the textbook's definition of radiation?

What do we call the fields that are produced by stationary electric charges and moving electric charges? Who came up with a mathematical theory about waves that move through these fields? What do we call these waves? How fast do they move?

Make sure you clearly understand the measurable properties that waves have: Speed, wavelength, and frequency.

What's a photon? What characteristic do photons have, that determines how much energy each one has?

Make sure you're clear on what the inverse square law for light is, and how it works. If you move twice as far from a light source as you were before, how bright will the light seem to, compared to how it seemed before you moved away from it?

Figure 5.6 is a really important one to understand and remember. Here are some specific things to know:

What makes one portion of the electromagnetic spectrum different from another?
Know the order of the `portions', from gamma through radio.
Which portions of the electromagnetic spectrum make it through the Earth's atmosphere?

What do astronomers have to do, in order to observe electromagnetic radiation from the parts of the spectrum that don't make it through the Earth's atmosphere?

Next, Section 5.3 introduced the science of spectroscopy…

What is the phenomenon of dispersion, and how did it explain Newton's experiment with a prism?

Make sure you can clearly recognize the difference between a continuous spectrum (as shown in Fig. 5.10) and the solar spectrum shown in Fig. 5.11. What's visually different between the two types of spectra?

What explains the dark lines in the solar spectrum in Fig. 5.11?

Here's probably the most important thing to know from Chapter 5: Make very sure that you know the difference between a continuous spectrum, an absorption spectrum, and an emission spectrum (a.k.a. a `'line spectrum' or a `bright-line spectrum'). (Skipping ahead a bit, this is shown in Fig. 5.21.) Also make sure you know how each of these type of spectra forms.

To understand how each type of spectrum forms, and what each type can teach us, carefully study Section 5.4, on the structure of the atom. Here are some specific things to know:

What is the nucleus of an atom?
Where are the electrons located?
What kinds of particles are in the nucleus?
What type of electrical charge does each of the three types of particle have?

What are isotopes of an element? Make sure you understand what's different between the three hydrogen isotopes shown in Fig. 5.17.

What are the energy levels in an atom? Can an electron occupy a level that's between energy levels? (It's worth studying the apartment-building analogy that the book uses here.)

How do photons interact with the electrons in an atom? How does the `boosting up' and `dropping down' of electrons cause the phenomena of absorption and emission? It's worth studying Sec. 5.5 in detail. Don't forget Fig. 5.21, illustrating the three different types of spectra and how a star and a gas cloud would produce each type.

The last important thing to know and understand in Chapter 5 is the concept of the Doppler shift, in Section 5.6. Make sure you know how motion affects the wavelength that you receive when you're listening to sound waves or observing electromagnetic waves.

What is radial velocity?

What are redshift and blueshift? What causes each one?

Extra Credit: Be able to solve problems like the ones in Example 5.6.