ASTR 494

Semester's Start

“Upon introductions I always wish to lavish a great deal of energy, in the case of this semester forthcoming due to how dry many an attempting scholar have found my course to be. However you have my word, as an educator, as a brother, as a mentor, and as your fellow man that I will never attempt to use cheap gimmicks in an attempt to engage you with the material. The podium of obscene vernacular is the lazy professors’ dwelling, and within this lecture hall I vow to never to convey a lesson weighed down with gaudy anecdotes, but instead to let it rise unhindered through the rows and enter the minds of those who allow it entry.

Allowing yourself a survey of the room in which you find yourself seated will produce the following realization (if we are like of mind): every single student sat down here today is at the very cusp of graduation and wishes to strive themselves further than the rest. Astronomy course four-nine-four, a class I’ve held the privilege of teaching for some thirteen years, is a senior course designed by the department of science to cover the obscure and unusual found in the stars above. It is, in my opinion, the best course available for me to instruct for it permits me the unique position of approaching a group of worn and learned men, whose romanticization of the field is near always cursory at its height or vanished at its base, and to turn the tempered flickers of the familizared, the well versed, the knowledged back into the roaring flames of the curious, the clueless, and the hungry.

Every human being is born with a fascination of the stars. This is true, this is in their blood, this is nature. Humans are the distinct rulers of this planet in this chapter, and the chief species able to recognize and appreciate what lay outside our atmosphere. No other mammal will stare up in awe as we do, no other life form that we know can grasp the sheer scope that we may, nothing else in the Kingdom of God will hold you in its sway once it holds you. To the common man, Astronomy may not mean much at all. The glistening above it written off as “space” and filed away in exchange for the problem of the day, never reopened or explored. All of you, however, were not satisfied with that response. You rose, you stood, you disagreed and you ventured out beyond not only what we can see with the naked eye but out to far beyond our sun.”