The Classroom Astronomer #13 Lite - November 16, 2021
Eclipse Things to Do; Using iTelescope, Part 1; Hubble's Nebulae; Earth's Eccentricity; Eclipse Subscription Special; 37.5% Black Friday Sale
Cover Photo - iTelescope in Spain
In This Issue:
(Italics = Full subscribers only, in whole or in part)
Cover Photo - ITelescope’s Spanish Observatories
Welcome to this Issue! - Our New and Revamped Homepage!;
The Moon’s Light is Reduced in Eclipse, and So is Our Subscription Rate for Then;The November 19th Nearly Total, Longest Partial Lunar Eclipse - What Can You Do Educationally?
Connection to the Sky - Hubble’s Field Guide to Nebulae
The RAP Sheet – Research Abstracts for Practitioners - How Eccentric Is the Orbit of the Earth, and Where Is the Sun?
Astronomical Teachniques - IAU-Shaw: The Moon; What Can We See With Spectra?
Astronomy Remotely - (Cover Story) Observing with iTelescope, Part 1
The Galactic Times Inbox Magazine #13 Highlights
The Black Friday/End of Year/Holidays with 37.5% Discount Sale
Welcome to this issue of The Classroom Astronomer Inbox Magazine!
In this issue, we continue with the wonderful Teachniques from the IAU--Shaw conference, just as the Astronomical Society of the Pacific’s gears up.
Sky events for students—always a priority. These two weeks start with a very nearly total eclipse—use to measure Luna’s distance and size—and end with three planets beginning an evening line-up. [If you’re a Lite reader, see our Deeply Eclipsed Rate below, to see all!]
TCA’s Astronomy Remotely column takes its first dive…into iTelescope.net.
And we test YOUR knowledge about Earth’s orbit in a misconception article.
Meanwhile, the homepage for The Classroom Astronomer has been revamped and updated! There’s an index to all (now) 13 Inbox Magazine Issues’ contents by celestial object and educational subject area, and Tables of Contents. More special content will be added over time. Come explore ! http://www.classroomastronomer.com
Subscription and archive (for full subscribers only): https://classroomastronomer.substack.com .
We have an Eclipse on November 19th…on our Subscription Rate….as Well as on the Moon….
The Moon will be in umbral shadow, shining at a lower brightness for 3:29.0, so from November 16 through November 19, you can subscribe to The Classroom Astronomer for the Eclipse Rate of $32.90 less per year (i.e., $22.10, essentially, $0.92 or less per 14-19-page issue, or $1.84 per month). Click on the link three lines below, not the regular Subscription Button, to get the Eclipse Rate! When the Shadow goes away (November 19th), so does the Eclipse Rate…..
Click for the Eclipse Rate Here: https://classroomastronomer.substack.com/eclipse
Publisher -- Dr. Larry Krumenaker
The November 19th Nearly Total, Longest Partial Lunar Eclipse - What Can You Do Educationally?
For the US East Coast, you can observe a totally post-midnight “all-nighter” lunar eclipse, going practically until dawn. For the West Coast and Pacific Rim, it begins on the 18th and goes past midnight. This eclipse gets almost but not quite into total eclipse territory, just 3% of the Moon not getting into the umbra—the totally no-sunlight central shadow of the Earth. That last bit gets some sun, in the thin, dusky penumbra, where if you were on the Moon, you’d see the Earth partially blocking ol’ Sol. Visually, you and your students just might find this to be a very interesting affair, with a bright white or bluish-white outer edge, and possibly coal black shadow on the opposite edge, with all sorts of gray-whitish-reddish variations slowly streaming across the Moon’s disk. It will just seem to take forever to happen, a minute shy of three and a half hours!
What can you do with a partial eclipse?
For one thing, in a normal central total lunar eclipse, that penumbra generally doesn’t get thick enough to be visible to the unaided eye until about 20 minutes before totality begins, and disappears 20 minutes after it ends. But with this glancing blow, could those first and last moments be farther from those moments? How sharp ARE your eyes? Give it a try and let TCAN know!
You can actually use total lunar eclipses to measure the Moon’s distance from Earth, and even its diameter! You can do so by either having two observers, preferably at opposite sides of the zone of eclipse visibility on Earth (not quite the same as opposite sides of the Earth), take a photograph at the same instant—you’ll both see the exact same eclipsed Moon because lunar eclipse phenomena doesn’t depend on your location like those of solar eclipses. You will, though, have slightly different starry backgrounds behind the Moon, a lunar parallax, and like surveyors, that angle can be used to get the Moon’s distance. Also, plotting the edge of the Earth’s shadow on the surface of Moon, and placing the plots on a piece of paper properly scaled give a passage record through the shadow, and THAT can give both size and distance information for our satellite.
In the old Classroom Astronomer magazine, a series of articles on how to do this appeared, and while the particulars were for an eclipse over a decade ago, the procedure is still the same. The article is still online, and you can click on this link and download the four articles on what you can do with/in a lunar eclipse for free! http://www.classroomastronomer.com/measurethemoon/
The RAP Sheet – Research Abstracts for Practitioners
What’s in the scholarly astronomy education journals you can use NOW.
B. Rovšek (2021). How Eccentric Is the Orbit of the Earth, and Where Is the Sun?, Physics Teacher, 59, 438, September 2. https://doi.org/10.1119/10.0006123 .
Always good to check one’s own (mis)conceptions: which is the correct answer to the question entitling this article?
While your rattling your brain on that, Ms. Rovsek wondered while most college-level physics student-teachers chose C or D. The answer came to her that, despite years of teaching and all sorts of pedagogical efforts at misconception busting, students have been inundated for two decades with illustrations in books and on the Internet showing the Earth’s orbit’s eccentricity as rather extreme (to prove the point that it has some?), or to give a reference point to where the Earth is during its different seasons. In some cases, illustrators try to show both concepts, having a highly eccentric ellipse and an off-centered Sun, because in an ellipse the Sun will not be centered, right? The problem is, even the Earth’s eccentric orbit is barely different from a circle, and she shows, even one ten times more eccentric hardly looks non-circular.
So when you are talking seasons, talk tilt. When you are talking ellipses, talk eccentric. When you are talking Earth’s orbit, mention it does both, but it is hardly a National Enquirer S H O C K I N G display!
Oh, and the correct answer is A.
Connection to the Sky
Hubble’s Field Guide to Nebulae
A four-minute plus video from NASA on the major types of nebulae in the sky, beautifully illustrated with Hubble images. The URL is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYRDiR7peLw .
Astronomical Teachniques
Continuing our series of Teachniques from the Heidelberg IAU-Shaw astronomy education conference….
* IAU-Shaw: The Moon
(Busting Phases Misconceptions, Observing the Moon for angles and motion, A list of naked eye Moon observations you can make over time, or Full Subscribers only)
* IAU-Shaw: What We See With Spectra
(For full subscribers only)
Astronomy Remotely
Observing with iTelescope, Part 1
I always wanted my own research level telescope. Alas, a vagabond life in journalism and academia made that impossible. For yours truly, iTelescope.net may be as close as he could get.
iTelescope is designed to do research. There are 21 telescopes at the moment, in four countries (though most are split between Australia and the USA), ranging from small Celestrons and some refractors to 24-inch reflectors with every mechanical doodad you could wish for. While the majority of the technology is for various kinds of astrophotography, some scopes are rigged to do photometry (measuring brightness of stars) and some experimental spectroscopy is being attempted. In most cases, you reserve a time slot, you can set your targets from pre-selected ones (I wanna shot of M65) to you-pick-the-coordinates, the telescope picks the right settings and, if visible, gets your picture. In other cases, you can make manual changes to the settings yourself, and in some circumstances, you can take the time to, computer agreeing with you, point-and-shoot the scope as if you owned it.
Let’s start at the beginning.
(History, Costs and Reservations, software requirements, for full subscribers only)
In Issue 13 of The Galactic Times Inbox Magazine:
Cover Photo — The Astronomy of Ophiuchus
Improved and Revamped Homepage: www.galactictimes.com !
This Just In —Are White Dwarfs Solar System Post-Mortems?;
Knock, Knock. No, You Can’t Come In.Sky Planning Calendar —
* Moon-Gazing - The Longest Partial Eclipse;
* Observing—Plan-et — Venus’ Peak Show;
* Border Crossings (Cover Story) — Special Report - Dr. Fauci’s SignAstronomy in Everyday Life — You Think?
Subscribe to it here! It’s Free!
The Black Friday/End of Year/Holidays with Increased Discount Sale.
Every year, Hermograph Press tries to clear its inventory shelves with an End of Year Etc. sale, in which a discount coupon nets you a discount off the sale. Sort of like Hermograph Roulette. With each issue of The Galactic Times and The Classroom Astronomer, the discount increases, but historically, the inventory goes down on some items so quickly that if you wait too long, there isn’t left on an item you want to buy at a greater discount!
For this two weeks’ run, the discount off any item in the Hermograph Store is”
37.5%
Use Code EOY3, good until November 30th, 2021.
==Astronomy and Education Related Items==
==Historical Tourism Books==
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