The Classroom Astronomer #10Lite - October 1, 2021
Birthday Subscription; Connections: World Space Week, Virtual Goddard; Supernova Remnant Sounds, Stellarium Activities, and a Flat Moon; RAP Sheet, including Einstein's Gravity for Primary Schoolers
Cover Photo - Star Cluster HR Diagrams from Stellarium!
In This Issue:
Connections to the Sky -
Testing Activities Online for the Rubin Observatory;
SETI Institute Joins Unistellar & The Planetary Society to Inspire Girls to
Discover Space During World Space Week;
Virtual GoddardAstronomical Teachniques -
The Sound of a Supernova’s Structure;
Virtual Observations from Stellarium;
An Additional Stellarium Exercise Resource;
A Flat Moon?The RAP Sheet – Research Abstracts for Practitioners -
Periodicity and Change: Talking about Time Inside the Planetarium Dome;
The Gateway Science: a Review of Astronomy in the OECD School Curricula,
Including China and South Africa;
Physics for the Masses: Teaching Einsteinian Gravity in Primary SchoolThe Galactic Times Newsletter Highlights
It’s My 287th Birthday on Mercury!
On October 15th, Earth Calendar, I celebrate my 287th rounding of the Sun — on Mercury! And as a treat to my TCA Lite Readers, I’m offering a Birthday Subscription rate that is $28.70 off the annual rate! You can get The Classroom Astronomer Newsletter for just $36.30 a year, or a $5 recurring charge each month. The first way = $1.51 per issue of about 14 printed pages of astronomical education information every ~15 days! And you’ll get the FULL TEXT OF EVERY ARTICLE instead of the shortened text of TCA Lite editions.
This offer is good from NOW until October 15th and then the rates go back up to normal $7/$65.
- Dr. Larry Krumenaker
Subscribe NOW!
Connections to the Sky
Testing Activities Online for the Rubin Observatory
Dr. Ed Prather, noted astro educator, a dear colleague, and someone who definitely influenced my teaching, recently posted this missive:
“I NEED YOUR HELP with class testing an activity this semester!!! For the past several years I have been working with folks at the Rubin Observatory to create a new suite of online investigations that use real data to get students studying about contemporary topics that we all teach. The activities can be done in 1-2 class periods using just a browser (in lecture, zoom breakout, or lab), with no special training or software. They use a Tutorial-like sequenced question approach, but have more interesting data tasks and tools and simulations built into them. These activities have already gone through one round of testing but we are wanting to do a final round with the new versions of the investigations. So if you are able to help with testing please complete the online application form ASAP at https://ls.st/ptapp. Testing will run through December 17th.
TOPICS Include:
Coloring the Universe (Constructing color balanced astronomical images using broadband filters)
Expanding Universe (Constructing a Hubble plot using real Galaxy and SN images/data to understand accelerated expansion)
Surveying the Solar System (Characterizing data on small Solar System objects in support of solar nebula theory)
Exploring the Observable Universe ( Studying the distribution of galaxy clusters over time to understand the evolution of large scale structure)
Hazardous Asteroids (Characterizing data on asteroids to determine if they are PHAs and evaluating the damage an impact with Earth would cause)Exploding Stars (Examining SN data to better understand stellar evolution)
Thank you very much for your help with class testing!!!!!
SETI Institute Joins Unistellar & The Planetary Society to Inspire Girls to Discover Space During World Space Week.
"As a young girl ~ 8 years old, I was walking along a very dark beach in the Florida Keys with my dad - as he pointed out the constellations, I remember thinking that on a planet circling one of those stars, there would be a young creature walking along their beach and seeing our Sun as a star in their sky," said Jill Tarter, Co-Founder of the SETI Institute and SETI pioneer. “Having a science-based view of all of us as Earthlings will foster the cooperation that will be needed to find solutions to the challenges that threaten our long future on this planet.”
The SETI Institute is supporting a vital effort to help girls discover space during World Space Week, October 4-10, 2021. The 2021 theme for World Space Week is "Celebrating Women in Space," and the SETI Institute is teaming up with Unistellar and The Planetary Society to help girls discover all the wonder and possibilities of space. This initiative supports one of the SETI Institute’s strategic goals of improving science literacy in general and focusing on girls and other underserved communities. (more)
Virtual Goddard
The visitor center at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, is offering free virtual field trips for groups looking for STEM engagement this school year. The field trips, which are free for the public, feature a live presentation and question-and-answer session led by trained staff.
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/goddard/2021/nasa-goddard-visitor-center-offering-free-virtual-field-trips-during-2021-2022-school
Deanna Trask, Deanna.m.trask@nasa.gov
[Is it time for class already? Check with the
Hermograph Sundial T-shirt
!] Besides, who goes to class on sunny days anyway?…..
Astronomical Teachniques
The Sound of a Supernova’s Structure
I am a big fan of sonification, for both sighted and visually impaired persons. Not all sonifications are educationally worthwhile but once in a while I come across one that is. Here is one such of value, the structure of the Tycho Supernova remnant. It starts out in the center of the circular structure and moves outward as a circular beam. As you reach greater or lesser densities, the sound changes. The sonification from Chandra can be found on YouTube: https://youtu.be/OmhxMdS-Q9E (more)
Virtual Observations from Stellarium
This article has been promoted from a RAP Sheet review to a Teachnique because it is by far one of the finest I’ve seen come around in a long time with a multitude of teachable ideas for astronomical in-the-classroom observing. N. Kaltcheva and M. Nenkova’s November 2021 article in Physics Education, Teaching Introductory Astronomy Using Virtual Observations, uses Stellarium. Normally considered as a simple planetarium program, i.e. making star charts, seeing what tonight’s sky will offer for Moon and planets for any date and location is just the start of this free program’s value. Stellarium can be loaded onto your servers or laptops, or you can just use your browser and head to its website and use it live. These two college professors have mined the program’s multitude of linked databases to give their (and YOUR!) students access to more data than you could possibly photocopy for homework assignments in your lifetime. Put your cursor on any star and a buffet of astrophysical data comes up on the screen.
For an example, use the parallax distances for the stars within a constellation and see that they are not physically related, and can be at very different distances from the Earth. Or, students can easily apply the relationship between brightness ratio and magnitude difference, b1/b2 = 10^0.4(m2−m1), to calculate how many times one object is brighter than another based on the difference in their apparent magnitudes.
A more sophisticated use of the data involves students selecting their own sample of stars from where they can observe the sky, and investigating the kinds of stars through making an HR diagram. (more)
An Additional Stellarium Exercise Resource
Also in Physics Education, 56, but in the March 2021 issue, an extremely short article discussed this resource for recreating a bunch of ancient observations by V. M. Spathopoulos —www.mysciencewalks.com/stellarium-resources.html .
The full list of 14 activities are: Astronomy and the Odyssey; Estimating the circumference of the Earth (Eratosthenes); Estimating the circumference of the Earth (Posidonius); Estimating the distance to the Sun (Aristarchus); Estimating the size of the Moon (Aristarchus); Estimating the distance to the Moon (Hipparchus); Measuring longitude difference with the eclipse of Alexander the Great; Journey of Pytheas; Babylonian cycles; Determining the direction to Mecca; Great Conjunction of 1166 CE; Observation of medieval supernovas; Chinese pole star; Sidereal day of Aryabhata.
A Flat Moon?
Oh, the Flat Earth Society folks around the world are going to hate this November 2021 Physics Education article….
In The Moon, a disk or a sphere? (https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6552/ac1a05 ) is a simple, marvelous experiment. Is the Moon round or flat? (And, ultimately, Earth or Venus?) Using a styrofoam ball, a disk of the same size, a flashlight and a cell phone camera, all in a dark room, the Earth-Moon-Sun system is reproduced and an attempt to recreate the entire cycle of phases, with the Moon represented as a disk or a ball, is made. Do you get the phases with a disk? Of course not! You do not get the curved terminator (the day-night line) on the Moon with a disk. (more)
The RAP Sheet – Research Abstracts for Practitioners
What’s in the scholarly astronomy education journals you can use NOW.
J. B. V. Marques, A. P. Carlin, M. Gomes, and R. Moutinho (2021). Periodicity and Change: Talking about Time Inside the Planetarium Dome, Science Education, September. https://doi.org/10.1002/sce.21681
What kind of time is demonstrated in the planetarium? From a study of 26 hours of recordings of instructors discussing time-related topics, certain somewhat obvious facts were concluded. The major concepts were changes in time, and periodicity. Many of the time concepts were those related to Earth’s rotation and revolution, which should be of no surprise to anybody since that was the basis behind the purpose of the planetarium device in the first place. Often, the time concepts were discussed from ground views but, increasingly, more from space views, a good thing. At least there is a new word for this—allocentric. The authors noted that the concepts were at least tied to more engagement activities, such as audience birthdays and other baselines.
It was mentioned that other time units related to other celestial bodies were mentioned…but exactly WHICH or HOW was not! It would be very interesting to have TCAN readers comment back on any other time measures and periodicities they show or discuss. Galactic? Variable stars? Other planetary time units? Milky Way rotation? Universe expansion? What??
S. Salimpour and 21 others, (2021). The Gateway Science: a Review of Astronomy in the OECD School Curricula, Including China and South Africa, Research in Science Education, 51, pp. 975–996 (August). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11165-020-09922-0
Thirty seven countries—a whirlwind tour. Fifty-two total curricula from the leading industrialized nations, specifically the Organisation for Economic and Cooperative Development (OECD) member countries, plus China and South Africa, and the International Baccalaureate Diploma curriculum. How does astronomy hold up? The good news? It is in at least one grade in every country. Fourteen countries have it in every grade!!! Where can I sign up to supervise astronomy there? (more)
M. Ruggiero, S. Mattiello and M. Leone, (2021). Physics for the Masses: Teaching Einsteinian Gravity in Primary School, Physics Education, 56. (November). https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6552/ac1ca3
So you think your little 5th grader is an Einstein? Let’s find out….
These Italian researchers went into three different classes of 10-11-year-olds of different socio-economic classes and ethnicities and introduced students to gravity as a spacetime function, and before they had an introduction to Galilean-Newtonian gravity. Could they get the idea that gravity was the deformation of space-time, and not a universal, mutual attractive force at a distance?
First, let’s talk about what Einsteinian gravity is: As they quote physicist John Wheeler “spacetime tells matter how to move, matter tells spacetime how to curve’. Consequently, gravity is explained in terms of a spacetime deformation, due to the presence of matter; in turn, the motion of matter is determined by the spacetime curvature.” But students, and MANY adults have a LOT of misconceptions about gravity, in the Newtonian sense. So let’s also talk about what gravity is NOT: “gravity needs air to act, magnetism and gravity are connected, and the same is true for electrostatics and gravity. More generally, students need a connection in order to realize the abstract notion of action at a distance. (more)
In Issue 10 of The Galactic Times Newsletter:
Cover Photo — The Molten Ring
This Just In — Predicting a Supernova 16 Years From Now
3D Printing of Molecular Interstellar Clouds
You Think YOU Have Flooding Problems??
Getting Breezy on Jupiter
A Nearly Complete Einstein Ring
A Whole Lot of Gas, or a New Spiral Arm?Sky Planning Calendar — Moon-Gazing; Observing—Plan-et —Venus’ phases, and conjunction with Delta Scorpii—a gas blowing star; Border Crossings; For the Future
Astronomy in Everyday Life — The Starry Streets of Mobile; Mercury’s NOT Retrograding THAT Way!
Subscribe to it here! It’s Free!
Purchase Back Issues of the original Classroom Astronomer Magazine online! This issue’s featured issue is TCA #8—-
In this issue:
Measuring Star Brightness with a Digital Camera
Visual Spectroscopy and the Borders of the Colors
Digital Spectroscopy - Light with a Laptop
Measuring Galaxy Spectra for Velocities
Demonstrating the Loss of Starlight
Using Spectra to Determine Planetary Nebulae Properties
Alternative Universes -- That 6th Grade Earth Science textbook said WHAT?
Astronomy Planning Calendar - Summer
The RAP Sheet - Research Abstracts for Practitioners -
Children's Answers to "What is a Day?"
Using Online Archived Data to Learn About the Causes of Tides
Should We Teach Astronomy Once or Four Times, and Why
Photons Focused On: -- Teacher at the Telescope, Getting Spectra
Astronomical Teachniques - Candied Physics!; Using a Magazine to Teach Literacy in a Middle School Science Class
Purchase a PDF online for $7.95 at the Hermograph Store.
Coming Soon!
Learning Astronomy Under The Northern Stars – A 365-Night Per Year Textbook
Use the stars that are ALWAYS visible to understand basic astronomy, stellar evolution, galactic structure, with the naked eye and common binoculars. EBook and print book coming. Detail description and advance orders coming soon (sorry for the delay!).
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