For me, personally, there’s no experience on Earth which can quite rival your first view of the heavens.

Outside on a crisp, clear night in the middle of winter, wrapped up in a thick overcoat as protection against the biting cold with that familiar tingling in the tip of your nose as the frost robs you of your body heat… Looking up at the sky and seeing the stars for the first time.

There’s simply nothing like it. It stays with you.

Later, when the first waves of euphoria have dissipated, you step back a few paces, try to take it all in. And then you begin that journey, the adventure which takes you down the path towards trying to figure out how it all fits together, how it all works, and what part, if any, you have to play in this great celestial drama.

Looking at the night sky can inspire many feelings - curiosity, bewilderment, surprise, joy, humility. Indeed, a few minutes under the stars can give rise to all manner of deep, philosophical questions: “What’s out there?”, “How was it made?”, “Who or what made it?” and “Is this all that there is?”.

Your first observing session can be a spiritual and uplifting experience, perhaps humbling too.

Humans love to explore. We love a new frontier, an opportunity to push back against our boundaries. Paraphrasing the brilliant astronomer, Carl Sagan, your first foray into astronomy is a bit like standing on the shores of a vast cosmic ocean, of walking out into the shallows just to see what’s beyond the shoreline. You’re not sure what you’ll find but, hey, let’s take a few steps and just see for ourselves.

However, to my mind at least, this isn’t always an easy process. The emerging amateur astronomer quickly becomes lost, hopelessly adrift and at once submerged beneath a deep and unfathomable storm surge of facts and figures, of theories and predictions, of what might have been and what could be. Surrounded by a sea of mathematics and formulae, physics and metaphysics, which you cannot even begin to comprehend, you’re left bewildered and becalmed. And much of that magic, that initial sense of wonder, is quickly gone.

In many ways, that’s what this course is not about, certainly the first part anyway. This course is about recovering and retaining some of that lost marvel, the curiosity, the sense of wonder that first took hold and lead you, inexorably, towards this mother of all sciences, astronomy.

In a nutshell, this course is aimed those who are curious about astronomy and the nature of the Universe but who don’t want to get swamped in a vast array of technical details or deep, mathematical concepts. This course is about exploring the sky for yourself and becoming familiar with the language and the concepts, and retaining that “Hey! Wow!” factor.

Do you need to have certain mathematics skills to proceed? No, not for a while yet. There will be no difficult equations anywhere in this first volume. Later volumes might get a bit deeper but, again, there won’t be masses and masses of numbers and elaborate formulations.

So, settle back and enjoy the ride.