Observational astronomy is a powerful tool for multiple fields in the scientific community. From a hobbyist astronomer’s backyard setup to telescope payloads on spacecraft, optical systems literally all around the Earth are currently taking data to help us learn more about our universe. In this course, we’ll dive into a few applications of observational astronomy to understand the capabilities and breadth of optical systems.

Ellen Glad is instructing this course. She is an Optical Research & Development Engineer at Millennium Space Systems in California, USA and has worked in the space industry after graduating from California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo ("Cal Poly SLO") with Bachelors of Science in Aerospace Engineering with a concentration in Astronautics. Throughout high school and college, she has taken on multiple astronomy-related research projects and enjoyed doing astrophotography and landscape photography in her free time.