See my copyright notice for fair use practices. This chapter gives you the Big Picture called cosmology.
Cosmology is the study of the nature, origin, and evolution of the universe as a whole.
The observational aspect of cosmology deals with finding distances to galaxies which is necessary for determining the geometry of the universe. This was covered in the last chapter . Vocabulary terms in the text are in boldface . At first you might think that in order to understand the structure of something as large as the universe, which by definition contains everything there is, you would need some very powerful telescope to see to the farthest reaches of space and a complex theoretical model. Actually, there are some powerful conclusions you can draw from observations with the naked eye.