Materials From Carl Sagan's College Courses Now Available Online
Sagan Explains Photo by JPL, hosted on Wikimedia Commons I'm looking at the very first problem astronomer and science popularizer Carl Sagan assigned to one of his Harvard University classes in 1965. I'm already stumped. Can you do it? Sagan asked his students to derive the equation for the theoretical resolving power of a telescope—that is, the math describing the ability of a telescope to distinguish between two objects. You can see the entire problem set online, thanks to the U.S. Library of Congress, which recently digitized and posted course materials from this and one other class Sagan taught, at Cornell University. You can find links to all of the materials, including lecture notes and problem sets, in a blog post Special Curator Trevor Owens wrote about the newly digitized material. Sagan may have been best known for his popular...