A Practical Guide to Observational Astronomy provides a practical and accessible introduction to the ideas and concepts that are essential to making and analyzing astronomical observations.
Professor Burns earned his BA in physics at UC San Diego in 1979. He began graduate work at UC Berkeley in 1979 where he worked on an automated search for nearby supernovae. After after being awarded a Ph.D. in 1985, Professor Burns became a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wyoming. He spent the summer of 1988 as a visiting scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab where he helped found the Supernova Cosmology Project (SCP). He continued to work as a member of the SCP group while a faculty member at Harvey Mudd College, the US Air Force Academy, and Colorado College. The 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to the leader of the SCP for the group's discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae. During his career Professor Burns has observed using essentially all of the world's great observatories including the Keck Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope.