Stars and planets
By Dr. Dave Rothery

Why are so many people mad keen about things they can see in the night sky? All I can say is that when I was a lad in Birmingham, I enjoyed few things better than lying on my parents’ lawn, in a patch of shadow not reached by streetlights, and exploring the sky with my binoculars. Most of the time I was looking at stars, and before very long I found myself tracking the slow brightness changes in so-called variable stars, whose luminosity changes because of various kinds of instability in their outer layers.

Artist’s impression of the NASA-ESA probe Cassini approaching Saturn in November 2004.

In those days I wanted to be an astronomer when I grew up, but in the end I became a geologist instead. Much of my research now takes me to active volcanoes. However, it also gives me the opportunity to use my geological insight into how the Earth works for trying to understand processes that occur on other planets. One example of this is my involvement in characterising the landing site for the Open University-led Beagle 2 Mars lander. Another is that I have been able to contribute to teaching planetary science courses, most recently through writing a brand new beginners’ course called Planets: An Introduction, which requires about 100 hours total study, spread out over either 8 or 20 weeks according to how fast you want to work through it. This course is based around a new (2003) edition of my book Teach Yourself Planets which I wrote in association with the publishers Hodder and Stoughton for the kind of person who used to be referred to as ‘the interested layman’. To turn this into an Open University course I added a specially written full colour teaching text and activities to help the reader strengthen and test their insight into what they have read, and a large library of images and animations on a CD-ROM.

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Content last updated: 05/08/2003