For 85 years, the Amateur Astronomers Association of Pittsburgh has promoted popular astronomy in Western Pennsylvania and focused on the education of the general public and its members in the science and hobby of astronomy.

To foster this goal, the Mingo Creek Park Observatory in Nottingham scheduled a series of seminars in April of this year, called "The Birth, Life and Death of Stars." Another series of lectures, called "The Big Bang and Then Some,will begin at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 9 and be held on four consecutive Tuesdays.

Bill Roemer, an AAAP member for 18 years from South Fayette, will lead the seminars, starting with "Where We Are and Where Were Going." Session 2 on Sept.16 will take a look at the earliest fraction of time in the history of the universe, called the Planck epoch after Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Max Planck.

"We dont really know what happened at this time and may never know," said Mr. Roemer, former director of Mingo Creek Park Observatory. "Someday quantum mechanics may be able to provide an answer, but at this point we just dont know."

Session 3 on Sept. 23 is about when the universe rapidly expanded and gravity "decoupled" from other forces, which include the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force and electromagnetism.

"In the initial Planck epoch, the four fundamental forces were unified and the temperatures were extremely hot," Mr. Roemer said. "Between the times discussed in Session 2 and 3, gravity was no longer unified with the other fundamental forces and temperatures were cooling, and modern physics is now better able to understand what was happening then."

The final session of the series on Sept. 30, "Afterglow," will take the audience up to 10 seconds after the Big Bang and then leap forward to 380,000 years. It will cover the remnants of the Big Bang called the cosmic microwave background, which is still evident in the universe.

Ken Kobus, associate director of the Mingo Creek Park Observatory from BethelPark, said the AAAP is trying to rid people of the notion that they have to understand the math behind the beginning of the universe to understand what happened.

"People should just open up their minds to grasp the logic behind the beginning of the universe," he said. "They might have to listen to the theory a couple of times, but they will be able to understand it without being a mathematician."

Mr. Roemer has a mathematics degree from Youngstown State University and a masters in divinity from the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. An ordained minister, he is retired but still preaches at different Presbyterian churches almost every Sunday. He also runs Philanthropy Focus Inc., a business that recruits development officers for the nonprofit sector.

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Notthingham seminar series takes a look at Big Bang