Study Guide Beginning Astronomy Texas AM （天文学德州农工大学开始学习指南）.pdfVIP

Study Guide Beginning Astronomy You must know these things: Earths diameter is about 8000 miles Moons distance is about 60 Earth radii (240,000 miles) Average distance of Earth to Sun is about 93 million miles (150 million km) One light-year is how far light travels in a vacuum in a year, about 6 trillion miles. “Parsec” is short for “parallax of a second of arc” 1 pc ~ 3.26 light-years. Distance in pc is the reciprocal of the parallax in arcsec (d = 1/p). The Milky Way galaxy is about 75,000 light-years in diameter. The solar system orbits the Galactic center at 220 km/sec on a rather circular orbit. We are about 8000 pc (25,000 light-years) from the center of the Galaxy. Nearby galaxies have distances measured in millions of light-years. The most distant galaxies we can possibly detect are at distances of about 13 billion light-years. When observing them we are looking 13 billion years into the past. Phases of the Moon It takes the Moon ~29.5 days to go through its cycles of phases. It just keeps orbiting the Earth, month after month after month. So if you know when full moon or new moon occurs, you can figure out approximately when the last quarter moon occurred, the next quarter moon will occur, or any other phase for that matter. If you can draw a picture of the Moon going around the Earth, with the Sun off to one side, you can understand the phases. You dont really need to memorize what follows on the next few slides! The Moon goes through phases because it is basically spherical and the angle between the Earth, Moon, and Sun changes day to day. When the Moon is new, it is in the same direction as the Sun, so it rises when the Sun rises and sets when the Sun sets. When the Moon is 50 percent illuminated and at first quarter phase, it is one week (roughly) after new Moon. The first quarter Moon is high in the south at sunset. The first quarter Moon will set at roughly midnight. The ful