GCSE Astronomy

My school is apparently considering offering GSCE astronomy for 6th year students next year.
Has any one done this or do they know anything about it?
Before people start going on about mickey mouse subjects and stuff, it would just be an after-school extra.
I think it sounds like fun! Especially as I want to be a cosmologist.

I have a kick ass astronomy teacher. He's teaching us 1st year astrophysics stuff. And it is really interesting.

I love astrophysics.

Go on then, name some concepts which you enjoy.

I haven't been taught any of it, we don't get taught it until Year 13.

So why did you say that you love them? You don't have to be taught to teach yourself.

I have a kick ass astronomy teacher. He's teaching us 1st year astrophysics stuff. And it is really interesting.

How do you find it?

Its rather all theoritical for my tastes. I would rather do some of the more interesting but simple calculations eg finding the length of the shadow cast by the earth. etc

What do you do in your 1st year?

I'm stumped a bit on my current Astrophysics work on nuclear reactions in main sequence stars. Those ppI, ppII and ppIII chains are doing my head in a bit.

In my Intro to Astronomy module, we've done a lot about distances, parallax and stuff. There's also stuff about lifetimes of high and low mass stars, Hertzprung-Russell diagrams, galaxies. We also did stuff about absolute magnitude, apparent magnitude and brightness. I find it quite hard. We've not done anything on nuclear reactions in main sequence stars in detail, so I've not heard about those chain things .

We've done some basic astrophysics as well:

-Circumpolar stars
-Synodic period
-Absolute magnitude, apparant magnitude. stellar magnitude
-Nuclear reactions in main sequence stars
-Stellar and terrestrial coordinates
-Visual, photographic and solometric magnitudes
-Variable stars and the period luminosity correlation
-Colour lumonsity correlation
-Hertzsprung russell diagram
-Constellations and proper motion
-Cepheids
-Stellar evolution, and classification
-Spectral classes
-Stellar parallax
-Black body radiation (Wien and Stefan's law)
-Doppler effect

What you did in stellar classification.. is that like G, O, A type stars and stuff?

in our separate gcse physics we did a lot of the topics 2776 listed and the stuff about pp chains, ahh...the good days of year 10

you do all that in GCSE?