Night School
A cardiologist's astronomy degree, one course at a time — posted here because a public ledger is harder to abandon, and because someone else may be weighing the same enrollment.
Decades after the last formal classroom, I enrolled at Arizona State in the Astronomical and Planetary Sciences program — a degree with the emphasis its name implies squarely on physics. The reason is in the backyard: the observatory kept producing questions its operator couldn't answer. Why a globular cluster's stars share a birthday. What a light curve is actually confessing. Why the hydrogen in my narrowband filters glows at exactly the wavelength it does. Photography without physics is stamp collecting, and I wanted the physics.
This page is the running ledger — courses, grades, and where each one points the telescopes. It stays honest: the good marks and, should they come, the humbling ones.
Currently Enrolled
AST 111 — Introduction to Solar System Astronomy
A course titled "Solar System Astronomy" that marches, over seven weeks, clear out past the solar system — from a first tour of the sky and Newton's orbits through stellar spectra, the Sun as a nuclear powerhouse, the birth and death of stars, black holes and curved spacetime, the structure of galaxies, and finally the Big Bang itself. The title says neighborhood; the syllabus says cosmos. I'm along for the whole ride.
The work is four-part: PlayPosit micro-lectures with embedded questions, weekly problem sets, hands-on labs (stellar spectra and telescopic instrumentation among them — familiar ground for a man with three rigs in the yard), and timed quizzes. Text is the open-access OpenStax Astronomy. Real algebra required — my fifth-grade arithmetic, once again, respectfully declined.
The Transcript
| Course | Title | Term | Units | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AST 112 | Introduction to Stars, Galaxies, and Cosmology — structure and evolution of stars, star clusters, galaxies, cosmology. Stellar classification, variable stars and light-curve photometry, galactic structure, and lab practicals in Stellarium. | Summer 2026 | 4 | A |
Coursework & Projects
A Ball of a Hundred Thousand Suns
A short narrative piece on my favorite deep-sky objects — the globular clusters — built around M13, photographed from the backyard: a naked-eye smudge that resolves into a hundred thousand suns older than our own. Completed as an extracurricular under ASU's SCOPE project. View the story →
The Next Hurdle
The Calculus Problem
Here is the honest obstacle. A degree with "Planetary Sciences" in the name runs on physics, and physics runs on calculus — and my calculus dates to 1970. The functions have arguably multiplied since; ASU, reasonably, won't accept a fifty-five-year-old transcript line. My fifth-grade arithmetic carried me through pharmacy and medical school, but it will not carry me through this, and I'm oddly glad to circle back and rebuild the foundation properly.
The plan for the coming months: sit the math placement exam, aim to test directly into MAT 210, and take remedial coursework if the exam says I must. I intend to bite the bullet and go for it. And if it all comes apart — well, then I'm just another washed-out freshman pivoting to some gentler major, aspiring, as ever, to the effortless competence of my fellow Kentuckian George Clooney and falling some distance short. We'll see. The ledger stays honest either way.
Where It's Pointed
The coursework is not an end in itself — it feeds the instruments. The variable-star unit becomes an Algol photometry campaign this fall, measured in AstroImageJ, with observations contributed to the AAVSO. The stellar-classification work becomes a slitless spectroscopy program — a Star Analyser 100 diffraction grating, first light on Vega, working toward reading stars by their spectra from a Florida backyard. Somewhere past all of it sits the long-game target: understanding, not just imaging, the integrated flux nebula behind the Pleiades.
Follow along. The next entry posts when the registrar does.
Night School takes correspondence: [email protected]