Lecture Tutorials for Introductory Astronomy

Lecture Tutorials for Introductory Astronomy provides a collection of collaborative learning, inquiry-based activities for use in introductory astronomy courses. These activities were created using educational research and designed to lead you to deeper, more complete understanding through a series of structured questions. The questions prompt you to use reasoning to identify and correct misconceptions. All content has been extensively field tested and responds to reviewer demand, numerous interviews and nationally conducted workshops. 

About our authors

Eric Chaisson holds a Doctorate in Astrophysics from Harvard University, where he spent 10 years on the faculty of Arts and Sciences. For more than two decades thereafter, he served on the senior science staff at the Space Telescope Science Institute and held various professorships at Johns Hopkins and Tufts universities. He is now back at Harvard, where he teaches and conducts research at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Eric has written 12 books on astronomy and has published nearly 200 scientific papers in professional journals.

Steve McMillan holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s Degree in Mathematics from Cambridge University and a Doctorate in Astronomy from Harvard University. He held postdoctoral positions at the University of Illinois and Northwestern University, where he continued his research in theoretical astrophysics, star clusters, and high-performance computing. Steve is currently Distinguished Professor of Physics at Drexel University and a frequent visiting researcher at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study and Leiden University. He has published more than 100 articles and scientific papers in professional journals.