If you want to learn a science, astronomy is the place to start.
For most of what we do in this class higher mathematics is not a
prerequisite (although being comfortable with numbers is
helpful). Astronomy is a science based on geometrical, and often
very visual, models. You will find that it's important to be
able to visualize 3 dimensional spatial concepts, but often this
is enough to have amazing predictive power toward understanding
how the sky will behave. Such predictive power is the goal of
all science. We must develop a common understanding and
vocabulary for describing the visible universe. Much of our
observational exercises in this class will be aimed at
illustrating and testing these geometrical models of the
positions and motions of the stars and planets. Astronomy would
be pretty easy, and pretty dull, if the Earth stood still. In
fact, the Earth has several different motions which astronomers
long ago struggled hard to understand. One of these motions is
the Earth's rotation on its axis; anoth