... telescope¹

This part of the course will involve the use of software that permits you to virtually navigate the heavens (and learn quickly what and how to punch coordinates into a telescope to find it for yourself). A major point will be to educate you to where you can be an amateur astronomer and have fun with a good telescope for the rest of your life!

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... model²

It is worth noting that his ``heretical'' treatise, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres was published shortly before he died on May 21, 1543 and banned shortly thereafter, while Copernicus was buried in an unmarked grave. The Vatican only struck it from its list of banned books in 1835. However, his bones were recently rediscovered and were just reburied (on May 23, 2010), this time with much pomp and circumstance, in hallowed ground by the very church in Poland that banned his work. Copernicus, of course, is very dead and does not care, and they still haven't taken (the prosecutor of Galileo) Bellarmine's sainthood away, so I tend to view this kind of posthumous grandstanding with a fair degree of cynicism. But it is good that the church can at last - sort of - admit at least some of its many sins against the unbiased pursuit of truth.

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