OSPSANTG 95: Dark Skies, Big Data: Astronomy and Development in Chile
Instructor: César Fuentes
This interdisciplinary course uses Chile’s world-class observatories—located in the Atacama Desert, home to a large share of global ground-based observing capacity—as a platform to examine how frontier science translates into large-scale data systems, technology, and societal value.
Students explore the lifecycle of modern observation systems—from instruments and large-scale surveys to data processing, analysis, and real-world use—while engaging broader questions in engineering, environment, and public policy, including dark-sky protection, resource tradeoffs (water, energy, land), governance, and community engagement.
Through guest lectures, hands-on data workshops, and a field-based learning experience, students explore how scientific infrastructure operates in practice under real-world constraints.
While the course spans multiple themes, student work is designed to be discipline-specific and in-depth. The final project functions as a capstone in which students apply tools and approaches from their major or minor to a real dataset, system, or problem related to astronomy and development. This structure allows students to combine interdisciplinary context with rigorous, major-aligned work.
Units: 5 | Grading Basis: Letter grade | Component: Seminar (with field-based learning components, including a signature observatory experience)
Category: Elective
Department Credit:
Aeronautics & Astronautics major (technical elective)
Data Science major/minor (by petition)
Computer Science major/minor (by petition, with a computational final project)
Management Science & Engineering (by petition, Operations & Analytics–aligned coursework)
*All courses are subject to change.