From Planets to Cosmology: How I Built a 10-Week Summer Astronomy Reading Group
A behind-the-scenes look at designing and running a 10-week summer astrophysics reading group. Covers curriculum planning across stellar evolution, explanets, and relativity, blending breaking science news with practical physics calculations and custom HTML slide designs.
This summer, I volunteered to take on a project I’ve been wanting to for a long time: hosting a multi-week summer reading group dedicated to introductory and modern astrophysics, aimed at those interested in astronomy with minimal prerequisites.
What started as a simple idea (getting together with other astronomy enthusiasts to talk about cool physics) quickly evolved into an incredibly rewarding curriculum-building journey. Here is a look behind the scenes at how I designed the reading group, structured the learning, and how I built custom slide decks to host weekly engaging discussions.
1. Designing the Curriculum: Pacing the Universe
First, I did some digging to find a textbook that would be easy for beginners and enthusiasts. I eventually settled on Astronomy 2e by Fraknoi, Morrison, and Wolff. I particularly liked this one because it is 100% free and open-source (good for those with monetary restrictions), but is also college-level and peer-reviewed. I also personally enjoyed the fact that it is written in a more conversational tone and had excellent figures/imagery, making it good for a reading group. It was perfect for beginners too, as you could orient it to be more conceptual than math-heavy.
The biggest challenge when setting up this reading group was the scope. How do you decide which subfields to dive into? You could easily get bogged down in very niche fields like stellar winds or instrumentation/telescope design. So what do you choose? Luckily, since I was designing this for beginners, a general overview with a narrative arc worked well (like how many introductory college courses in astronomy function). The “core” curriculum involved weeks one through six, with the remaining four being labeled “additional” weeks:
- Week 1: Our Cosmic Neighboorhood: The Grand Tour
- Week 2: The Solar System
- Week 3: Stars: Engines of the Universe
- Week 4: Galaxies and the Expanding Universe
- Week 5: The Big Bang & Cosmology
- Week 6 What the heck is going on?: Modern Developments
- Week 7: Order of Magnitude Estimation: The Power of Ten
- Week 8: Distance Worlds: Exoplanets & Astrobiology
- Week 9: Black Holes: The Edge of Reality
- Week 10: Astroparticle & Multi-Messenger Astronomy
By keeping the meetings targeted at 60 minutes of verbal discussion, I tried to ensure that every session felt packed without being too much or burning anyone out.
2. Bridging News, Theory, and Math
A common pitfall I noticed with physics in general (including reading groups) is that they either become too popular-science (no depth) or too textbook-heavy (too many derivations and equations). To strike the right balance, while also considering the experience level of the group, I generally built every single week around a four-part structure:
- In the News: I kicked off each week with a breaking story from recent times (I tried to stay within 1-2 months, but some were within a year or two, and some longer, while some were discovered literally days before the meeting).
- Lecture & Concept Review: A quick, visual recap of the core chapter readings to get everyone on the same page. Sometimes, I would also introduce ancillary information.
- Thought-Provoking Questions: Philosophical and open-ended prompts (like the “Great Filter”) to spark group debate and help the group engage more intimately with the content. It also helped everyone get a feel on how research works, answering questions that don’t have a clear answer.
- Quantitative & Qualitative Problems: 1-2 simple practical calculations or conceptual physics problems (calculating transit depths or Schwarzschild radii). This would allow us to make judgements on the content we were learning with some connections to how we actually solve problems.
The only exception to this format was the Week 3 lecture on stars, which I made a complete lecture-style format. The motivation for doing so was because stellar astrophysics is a massive field, and probably could be made into its own reading group (not to say that others could not). To give it a proper treatment, I wanted to run through as much information as possible.
3. The Visual Aesthetic: Building Slide Decks in HTML/CSS
Rather than using off-the-shelf sotware, I decided to code custom HTML/CSS slide templates for weekly meetings. Designing them directly in code gave me total control over palettes, typography, embedded LaTeX, and responsive data charts.
Each major theme in the course got its own visual identity, and I liked to keep them astronomy related or of a similar vibe to the topic at hand (like a Voyager blueprint theme, or a Verdant Horizon theme for Exoplanets & Astrobiology).
4. What I Learned
Running a summer reading group taught me that teaching is the best way to learn (something I have realized a lot throughout the years). Having to explain complex concepts, sometimes on the fly, forced me to understand the material at a much deeper level.
If you’ve ever thought about hosting a reading group or study series on a topic you love: do it. That’s my advice at the very least.
To see the files, check out the GitHub.
Below as an example slide deck I created. This is week nine on black holes. This is one of the more simpler setups, but I think it is very visually appealing (although I do think all of them are visually appealing). This week, also, was more mathematically rigorous by request:
