found this book (a reader for some course with a “melbourne teaching college” stamp on it) in the book pile in my office at uni, and it’s got selections from works by galileo, kepler, copernicus and newton in the original latin! score for someone who teaches astronomy history! 🤩

dressed up as JWST observations for the telescope class and borrowed a prop from scienceworks for the moon classes

this week: solar system on monday with year 5s, light and colour with year 2s on tues, planning telescope observations with first years today and tomorrow, the moon and calendars tomorrow and friday with second years, and finishing off the week with planetarium evenings friday and saturday nights!

A round bulge of warm orange-hew light, intersected by two dark dust lanes. The blob of light is a galaxy and it is surrounded by a dense star field.

An almost edge on disc galaxy, with a small bright central region. The galaxy is very narrow and elongated and has a single dark dust lane on its outer perimeter

Looking down, over a swirly spiral galaxy with a bright central core and many stars flowing in its spiral arms, which are marked by dust lanes

A tightly wound, double spiral arm galaxy seen almost face on.

Oh how I am missing photographing my galaxy friends from my backyard. Here’s some from my archive … a collection of southern sky beauts, captured from the middle of the city with an 8” SCT.

Spirals really are beautiful & it always blows my mind that there are hundreds of millions of stars in each.

six hours of teaching today! first, second and third years, all learning about how things are moving in the solar system. i dressed to match!