Capturing the cosmos with observational astrophysics

Ninety-nine percent of astronomy can't be figured out by just looking up at the sky for just a few minutes. This course is observational astrophysics. Basically what we do is we'll go out to the observatory, we'll collect a bunch of data, and then we'll come back to this lab right here. We'll analyze the data and find the interesting things about whatever objects we're observing. There's basically an infinite amount of things you can observe in space. We've observed a nebula and analyzed the data. The second time, we observed something called a Cepheid star. Its light slightly fluctuates, and we wanted to analyze that fluctuation compared to other stars. And so that allows you to tell distances of those stars, the distance from us to those stars. That kind of technique where you're looking at the change in light over a period of time is very, very useful in a lot of different things in astronomy. This is definitely something I've been wanting to do for a long time. I have my own telescope, and I do my own astrophotography. And now I can actually see what an actual astronomer might do, an actual astronomer might observe.

academics 1:01 Capturing the cosmos with observational astrophysics

By:

Luke Hayes

8 Apr 2026 186

In John Simonetti’s observational astrophysics course, students step into the Anderson Observatory to photograph galaxies, nebulae, and star clusters—then dive into the data to uncover what those images reveal about the universe.

Academics

Campus Experience

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Global Impact