The Classroom Astronomer Digest - January 2022
Faster-Than-Light Hubble Deep Field Simulation; Spring Semester Sky Lessons; Teachniques--The Sun is More than Solar Observations, Image and Video Collections, Brute Force Observations of Algol; RAPs
In This Digest Issue:
<Brackets and Italics mans full story was available only in the Full Edition>
Welcome to the First TCA Digest Issue
Connections to the Sky - Zooming Through the Hubble Ultra Deep Field
<Locating the James Webb Telescope at L2>
Sky Lessons - “Spring Semester”
<Venus and Mars, on the Level?>Astronomical Teachniques -
Mind Your Beeswax!
Color Image and Video CollectionsA Brute Force Variable Star Plotting for Beginners
The RAP Sheet – Research Abstracts for Practitioners -
- Investigative study on preprint journal club as an effective method of teaching latest knowledge in astronomy
- Old Journals, New Journal (A Look at the New “Astronomy Education Journal”)
Below, these reviews have just summaries:
< - Assessing Preservice Elementary Teachers’ Understanding of Science Practices Using Children’s Astronomy Storybooks- A Historical Method Approach to Teaching Kepler’s 2nd Law
- Timing Pulsars: An Exercise in Statistical Analysis and the Scientific Process
- An Observational Project for a Large Class - Determination of the Duration of the Sidereal Day >
Table of Contents for the February 1st, Issue 18, TCA.
Welcome to the first, January 2022 TCA Digest!
Formerly the TCA Lite Edition, the TCA Digest covers the best of the month’s Full Edition articles and summaries of the rest, with a look at the upcoming TCA materials. It will be published each last day of the month. TCA will have either two or three issues each month, published on dates ending with a “1”, i.e. the 1st, 11th and 21st of each month. January 2022 had two issues. The next Digest will be on February 28th and should cover articles from three issues.
The Digest is free, but if you like what you read and want the details during the month — ALL the details — and don’t want to wait for the Digest, we invite you to upgrade your Digest subscription to a Full subscription. We’ll even give you a discount if you do it within the next week! Just click this button for our $30 for 30 issues upgrade. But do it by February 7th!
Thanks for subscribing!
Publisher -- Dr. Larry Krumenaker
PS: Incidentally, the homepage for The Classroom Astronomer has an index to all Inbox Magazine issues’ contents by celestial object and educational subject area, and with complete Tables of Contents. Also, each article or Teachnique is coded with grade level or venue: P for Primary grades, C for College/University, and so on. Come explore! This covers only Full Edition issues, not Digests and prior Lite Editions. It is not yet decided if Digest issues will be archived on the website. The homepage is at http://www.classroomastronomer.com .
Connection to the Sky
Zooming Through the Hubble Ultra Deep Field
This comes from an article in the Astronomy Education Journal. I’m not particularly interested in the Research or educational aspects of the article - they weren’t very novel - but the Java-enabled simulation is Ultra Cool!
The researchers made a 3-D representation of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, assigning the distances determined to each galaxy image, and then with Java, allowing Windows and Mac users to zoom into the Field at faster-than-light speeds, and up and down, left and right, with true three-dimensional panning and object shifting(!) and examine the data on each galaxy as well. [ See Cover Photo at the top of this issue.] The faster your processor, the better, but even on a slow ancient laptop, it is just plain fun. As you move left and right, galaxies move in front of one another, true perspective changing!
Their two educational uses, by the way, were fairly standard. First, to “identify galaxies by appearance, apply observed colors to the properties of its stars, and understand the differences between different Hubble classification types.” The second lab was a routine Hubble distance versus red-shift value, students picking galaxies and reading data from pop-ups. They also made some use of the program in outreach to the public.
The article is L. Nolan et al., “Interactive Cosmology Visualization Using the Hubble Ultra Deep Field Data in the Classroom,” Vol. 1, 1, pp. 12-23. The simulation is downloaded here, from Arizona State University.
<Locating the James Webb Telescope at L2>
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has all the excitement—it is due; it has been decades in the works. What has often been overlooked is where the telescope will be doing its work.
The JWST will be way out there, far beyond the Moon’s orbit, at a place called L2 in the Sun-Earth system, a million miles outward from the Earth directly opposite the Sun. The L points are places where the gravitational pulls of the Earth and Sun are balanced in such a way that the position of an object is stable. But it is not a ‘one pulls one way, the other pulls the opposite way’ kind of balance.
L2 has the Sun and the Earth both trying to pull the Telescope back in, but Kepler’s Laws are in effect here. His rules dictate that the farther out you orbit from a gravitational source, the slower you move. So being farther out from the Sun at L2, the natural thing would be to be moving around the Sun even slower than the Earth does and thus fall behind us eventually. But the Earth’s gravity is also trying to pull it in towards Earth, and that adds some speed back to the object at L2, so that ‘fall-behinded-ness’ is compensated and the object stays more or less in its place.
Checking a bunch of resources out there in astro-ed-verse, I only found one, dated exercise on Lagrangian Points, from a book by David Stern, that talks about various aspects of orbital mechanics. Included is a section on the Lagrangian Points. No labs, no simulations. But there was a calculation for the college-level or high school algebra-level student on how to calculate the distance to L1, the inner Lagrangian point, which is just as far inward as L2 is outward. The link is http://www.phy6.org/stargaze/Sorbit.htm .
<The rest of the article is in Issue 16>
Sky Lessons - “Spring Semester”
We depart a bit from our usual lesson plan, that of using the current sky as a lesson, to point out the future lessons the 'spring semester’ is going to provide. This will be defined as from now until May 1st. Some schools may go a bit longer, but many don’t, but we have a few teasers for them, too.
One thing this semester won’t be is devoted much to evening planetary studies! As we start, Saturn has said its farewell. Furthermore, you’ve got Jupiter and its four Galilean moons to work with during dark evening hours only until mid-February. There will be a really good evening apparition of Mercury in April and May, good for northern (especially) hemisphere observers, with Mercury even visible after twilight ends for ten nights, a rarity! Venus, Mars, and soon, Saturn, then Jupiter….all are or will be morning objects in the dawn or just before dawn breaks, until May or after when some are more easily viewed in dark pre-dawn skies for a while. Anyone for 5 AM classes? No, I didn’t think so….
Still, one reason to get students up in the dawn will be planetary conjunctions. There will be a bunch of good ones, good opportunities both to easily find planets with some surety, and also to witness planetary sky motions. Venus starts the round of meetings by passing 4 degrees from Mars on the 12th of March. On the last week of March, find Venus, Mars and Saturn together within a 7-degree binocular field in the dawn quite far from the Sun. Venus is 2-degrees from Saturn on the 29th.
April is more active with conjunctions:
4th—Mars and Saturn, 0.3-degree apart, Mars to the south, and almost equal in brightness,
12th—Jupiter 0.1-degree from Neptune,
27th—Venus and Neptune, 0.01-degree apart!
30th—Venus and Jupiter, 0.2-degree.
The do-si-do will continue in May with Mars having rendezvous’ with Neptune and Jupiter. Those having end of year class parties can do so with a total lunar eclipse on May 15th in North America, more or less centered on the Americas.
Though out of our semester window, there is a nice planetary June event, which will drive the astrologicals buggy…all five visible planets will line up IN ORDER in the morning sky, Mercury closest to the Sun, Saturn the farthest, and the Moon passing them all day by day, standing in for the Earth on June 24th. Will be a neat morning photographic tour for summer classes!!
Spring will be more of a evening stellar performance than a planetary dance….we’ll be talking about what you can teach about stellar astronomy anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere in future issues.
<Venus and Mars, On the Level?>
Late January Observing Project, in Issue 17
Astronomical Teachniques
* ASP Notes: Mind Your Beeswax!
First semester college students often need to be transitioned into —- real college students. Dr. Judy Beck, an advisor also in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of North Carolina Asheville, runs such a course for them. These seminars are often something that the professor gets to choose the topic, to do something THEY like that doesn’t usually fit into the standard menu card of departmental courses. Several years ago Dr. Beck chose a solar observation course with a multitude of multidisciplinary connections that many other astronomy educators ought to consider.
The Sun is a very relatable topic to students, regardless of their backgrounds! Asheville in 2017 had a total solar eclipse as a motivation but each year since she has about 20 students take her first-year’s seminar, now more a Science and Society than just Solar Observing course.
Some observations the students do are familiar to other astro educators. The course connects by Skype with a high school in Quito, Ecuador in time for the Equinox and does gnomon shadow measurements. They plot and compare shadow lengths and angles of altitude over time.
But Beck also connects with the local Cherokee Indian reservation and her students get involved with beeswax. What?? The students have to use solar furnaces (such as those at betterbee.com) that take ‘raw’ beeswax and melt them into molds created by students using computer-aided design programs and 3-D printed casts, into useful things such as soaps.
As part of the study of bees and wax, they learn about the honey-bees ‘waggle dance’ that is related to the position of the Sun in the sky, and with the Cherokees they initiate a study of legends of the Sun in other cultures. Gods (Helios and Ra), structures built around solar positions (Stonehenge of course, but also Chaco Canyon and the Mayan temples), events and rituals (Native American Sun dances, for one), and stories.
For more information on her course, email Judy Back at jbeck@unca.edu .
* ASP Notes: Color Image and Video Collections
Color images are possibly the general public’s greatest image of astronomy. It helps to be able to get good images you can use, in classroom, public talks or whatever situation you find yourself in. Image collections are helpful and so are softwares for manipulating them. Lars Lindberg’s Astronomical Society of the Pacific talk listed several useful sites:
* For converting FITS files, the major astronomy file format, to other types and manipulating them: https://noirlab.edu/public/products/fitsliberator/
* Images archives can be found at
- https://noirlab.edu/public/images ,
- https://esahubble.org/images ,
- https://iau.org/public/images , and
- https://www.eso.org/public/images .
The inventory ranges from 2000 at the iau.org site to 15,000 at the eso.org.
* Change “images” to “videos” in each of the above to get to…astronomical movies!
* A Brute Force Variable Star Plotting for Beginners
Perhaps the best eclipsing binary for beginners, with the deepest and most predictable eclipses, Algol, has two eclipses in ‘prime time,’ i.e. evening, during the next two weeks, on the 11th and 14th, to be precise. It will be late in the evening, and the eclipse takes about 10 hours. For beginners, what is best here might be to go out and make regular (every 30 minutes) comparisons between the three standard stars on the map below and see which Algol matches or which/how much it is in-between in brightness.
For those starting out, estimating magnitudes in decimals can be tricky. A good first graph exercise is a brute force graph— the Y axis is (highest starting point) brighter than star 2.1, equals 2.1, between 2.1 and 2.9, equals 2.9, between 2.9 and 3.4, equals 3.4, fainter than 3.4). Time is along the bottom X axis. Here might be the second half of an Algol eclipse, brute force style.
Once a student gets the idea, they can refine the next one by doing fractional magnitudes (‘let’s see, two-thirds of the way from 2.9 to 2.1 is 0.5-mags so Algol is magnitude 2.4 now….’).
The RAP Sheet – Research Abstracts for Practitioners
What’s in the scholarly astronomy education journals you can use NOW.
Article reviewed in Issue #16:
D. Santos, T. Goto, T.-Y. Lu, S. C.-C. Ho, T.-W. Wang, A. Y. L. On, T. Hashimoto, and S. S. C. Young. (2021). Investigative study on preprint journal club as an effective method of teaching latest knowledge in astronomy, Physical Review Physics Education Research, 17. June 28. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.17.010145
Even if you aren’t teaching grad students, this can be a good way to increase knowledge in your students. Have them read, discuss, and pontificate on articles in the news.
As any astronomy teacher know, textbooks get rapidly out of date; the flood of new results is never ceasing. At the college level, having students read and present new research results gets them into the field even if it sometimes is the deep end of the pool. These journal clubs, sometimes called Astro Coffee Clubs or Astro-ph’s, for students not in the field, or very new to it, that can be a drowning experience! How to make this a positive learning experience? The authors, mostly Taiwanese and some UK physics and astronomy faculty, found four factors that can help, whether you are dealing with grad students (or as this editor knows, if you have high school or even undergraduate astronomy students):
1. Commitment. Students who have to take the class (enrolled in it) are far more likely to succeed than those who just attend the presentations.
2. Regular and repeated presentations by the enrollees. Not just a one-and-done thing.
3. Either the instructor or the presenter has to prepare the audience/presenter with enough basic knowledge to make the article understandable.
4. The environment has to be pleasant enough and non-threatening, and the goal of doing the presenting clear.At the K-12 level, or undergraduate even, this has to be more than just a ‘book report’ but meant to be more like a lesson or ‘news update’ and something that produces both knowledge and skills in the journal club enrollee.
Old Journals, New Journal (A Look at Astronomy Education Journal)
The RAP Sheet monitors 27 mostly academic journals for this column. The point is to find research that we can present to you, the Reader, that you can turn around and use in the classroom, now, not some years from now when it filters down in workshops or textbooks or whatever. Not all articles in academia can provide that. The RAP Sheet is your filter.
The journals we monitor are mostly in English. True confession—yours truly does read some other languages but the technical-ese of non-English journals does sometimes get a bit too deep for his language skills for this column. But English is the, ahem, lingua franca of academia. Quite a few of the English language journals are international, not only in scope but in origin, so the bases are likely covered. Authors (and publishers) come from Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, South America, and the research concerns astronomy education in those areas, but are applicable everywhere.
Some peer-reviewed practitioner publications are also in the mix. Not all publications are equal, in that the number of astronomy education articles are not evenly distributed. By our counts, in the past six months, some published….one article. One published 39. Most are somewhere in between. And some are found in places you would never expect to find them. Scholarly architecture magazines! Environmental magazines! Who would have thought to look there? We do. Some are open access, others require a subscription or access through a library. And not all astronomy education articles are worth the time to talk about, or read. But it’s our job to do so, so you don’t have to….and find those articles where there is something you can use. Now.
Some brief history. Why so many publications? Astronomy education wasn’t considered much of a research field until only two to three decades ago. Enough clamor arose (as did the rising up of the Web) to finally cause some field pioneers to create a place to publish real astronomy education research articles. One of the best of all time was (past tense) Astronomy Education Review. It ran from 2001 to 2013, a one-stop shop for peer-review astronomy research. First published by the National Optical Astronomy Observatories and later by the American Astronomical Society, it survives as an archive on Portico. Since then, the peer review universe has been fractured and ill-defined, hence the large number of journals today.
No one journal since has stuck around. Hermograph Press, the publisher of this newsletter, made an attempt to publish a journal, the Journal and Review of Astronomy Education and Outreach (JRAEO). It managed three issues in 2014-15. Then came The Journal of Astronomy and Earth Science Education, from Clute. That publication, though, produced a mere six articles per year and has not produced an issue since June 2020.
Now there is a new publication to add to the mix. Announced way back in September 2019, and backed with IAU money, the Astronomy Education Journal has, on the next-to-last day of 2021, produced its first issue, of two scholarly articles and five practitioner pieces. All articles are free and open access. How often it will publish is not stated. It claims it will publish a host of other kinds of articles as well, though if it took more than two years to get this out, it might be biting off more than it can chew right now. We’ll have to see, but we wish them luck. Meanwhile, TCA will review some of that first issue here….and add it to the mix of article sites we’ll monitor to find useful articles you can use—now—in your classroom.
Articles reviewed in Issue #17:
J. Plummer, K. Cho, C. Palma, D. Barringer, T. Gleason, and K. Nolan. (2021). Assessing Preservice Elementary Teachers’ Understanding of Science Practices Using Children’s Astronomy Storybooks, Astronomy Education Journal, 1, 1, pp.1-11, Dec. 30. DOI: 10.32374/AEJ.2021.1.1.002
Elementary preservice teachers are taught astronomy, and how to teach it, by generating elementary student level storybooks. But is this practical? The storybook program isn’t listed in the article, teachers will not have the time in a real classroom. Too bad the good storybooks aren’t going to be published….
W. Lyra. (2021). A Historical Method Approach to Teaching Kepler’s 2nd Law, Astronomy Education Journal, 1,1, pp. 24-36. Dec. 30. DOI: 10.32374/AEJ.2021.1.1.004
A somewhat mathematical but mostly historical look at the Law of Equal Areas, usually looked at as proven later by Newton, and conservation of angular momentum, but that’s not how Kepler found the Law. He did it by realizing that the paradigm of equal angular motion over equal time simply couldn’t work with elliptical motions, even with epicycles or equants added in! A paradigm shift, and quantitative law, as powerful but more overlooked than the other two Laws.
Two beginning statistics articles:
J. R. Walkup, J. White and R. Key, (2021). Timing Pulsars: An Exercise in Statistical Analysis and the Scientific Process, Astronomy Educational Journal, 1, 1, pp. 42-45. Dec. 30. DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.32374/AEJ.2021.1.1.006 .and
W. Tobin, (2021). An Observational Project for a large class - Determination of the Duration of the Sidereal Day, Astronomy Educational Journal, 1, 1, pp. 37-41. Dec. 30. DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.32374/AEJ.2021.1.1.005 .
The first article has students measure some pulsar timings off YouTube videos and learn to take into account significant figures and uncertainties. The second has students measure the passage of a star past some marker nightly to the nearest second over two weeks, but more importantly, it shows way to stop student cheating.
Coming up in The Classroom Astronomer Inbox Magazine Issue #18, February 1st:
Welcome to Issue 18!
(Cover Story) Article - Making What Already Exists Accessible, Astronomy Labs for the Blind and Visually Impaired
Sky Lessons - A Progression of Star Clusters
The RAP Sheet – Research Abstracts for Practitioners - Which One Is More Effective in Teaching the Phases of the Moon and Eclipses: Hands-On or Computer Simulation?