Disc 1. Grand tour of the cosmos -- Rainbow connection -- Sunrise, sunset -- Bright objects in the night sky -- Fainter phenomena in the night sky -- Our sky through binoculars and telescopes.
Disc 2. Celestial sphere -- Reason for the seasons -- Lunar phases and eerie lunar eclipses -- Glorious total solar eclipses -- More eclipse tales -- Early studies of the solar system.
Disc 3. Geocentric universe -- Galileo and the Copernican revolution -- Refinements to the heliocentric model -- On the shoulders of giants -- Surveying space and time -- Scale models of the universe.
Disc 4. Light: the supreme informant -- Wave-particle duality of light -- Colors of stars -- Fingerprints of atoms -- Modern telescopes -- Better set of eyes.
Disc 5. Our sun, the nearest star -- Earth, third rock from the sun -- Our moon, Earth's nearest neighbor -- Mercury and Venus -- Of Mars and martians -- Jupiter and its amazing moons.
Disc 6. Magnificent Saturn -- Uranus and Neptune, the small giants -- Pluto and its cousins -- Asteroids and dwarf planets -- Comets: gorgeous pimordial snowballs -- Catastrophic collisons.
Disc 7. Formation of planetary systems -- Quest for other planetary systems -- Extra-solar planets galore -- Life beyond the Earth -- Search for extraterrestrials -- Special relativity and interstellar travel.
Disc 8. Stars: distant suns -- Intrinsic brightnesses of stars -- Diverse sizes of stars -- Binary stars and stellar masses -- Star clusters, ages, and remote distances -- How stars shine: nature's nuclear reactors.
Disc 9. Solar neutrinos: probes of the sun's core -- Brown dwarfs and free-floating planets -- Our sun's briliant future -- White dwarfs and nova eruptions -- Exploding stars: celestial fireworks -- White dwarf supernovae: stealing to explode.
Disc 10. Core-collapse supernovae: gravity wins -- Brightest supernova in nearly 400 years -- Corpses of massive stars -- Einstein's general theory of relativitiy -- Warping of space and time -- Black holes: abandon hope, ye who enter.
Disc 11. Quest for black holes -- Imagining the journey to a black hole -- Wormholes: gateways to other universes? -- Quantum physics and black-hole evaporation -- Enigmatic gamma-ray bursts -- Birth cries of black holes.
Disc 12. Our home: the Milky Way Galaxy -- Structure of the Milky Way Galaxy -- Other galaxies: "Island universes" -- Dark side of matter -- Cosmology: the really big picture -- Expansion of the universe and the big bang.
Disc 13. Searching for distant galaxies -- Evolution of galaxies -- Active galaxies and quasars -- Cosmic powerhouses of the distant past -- Supermassive black holes -- Feeding the monster.
Disc 14. Paradox of the dark night sky -- Age of the universe -- When geometry is destiny -- Mass density of the universe -- Einstein's biggest blunder? -- Afterglow of the big bang.
Disc 15. Ripples in the cosmic background radiation -- Stuff of the cosmos -- Dark energy: quantum fluctuations? -- Dark energy: quintessence? -- Grand unification & theories of everything -- Searching for hidden dimensions.
Disc 16. Shape, size, and fate of the universe -- In the beginning -- Inflationary universe -- Ultimate free lunch? -- Universe of universes -- Reflections on life and the cosmos.
|