The Classroom Astronomer July 2022 Digest
The Classroom Astronomer July 2022 Digest
Tactile Teachniques, Unusual Mastery Course; Robotic Scopes for Neophytes, and Research; Connections--Bio's, Movable Model Solar System, Summer Internships, Webb Photos, Exoplanet Research, More!
Cover Photo - A Robotic Telescope in Texas
In This Issue:
Cover Photo - A Robotic Telescope in Texas
Astronomical Teachniques
- NAM: How NOT to Do Tactile Astronomy
- RTSRE: Brightness, Color, Location for the Blind and Visually Impaired…and Sighted Students!- AAS: An Outline for Doing an Astronomy Mastery Course
Astronomy Remotely —
- RTSRE: What Kinds of Research Can You Do?
- AAS: Astronomy Learning for Neophytes Part 1 — SLOOH
- RTSRE: Astronomy Learning for Neophytes Part 2 — LCOConnections to the Sky -
- AAS: Astronomer Biography Calendar
- AAS: USNO Sky Information
- AAS: Hawaii’s Movable Model Solar System
- First Webb Photos’ Look-Back Times and Distance
- AAS: Planetary Radar for Students
- AAS: Summer Internships in Astronomy ResearchThe RAP Sheet
- What Hides Within a Photograph: Analysis of a Light Curve in the Classroom
- Grade Level Influence in Middle School Students' Spatial-Scientific Understandings of Lunar PhasesAll articles have been truncated (and slightly modified textually) to fit in the Digest!
Welcome to the July 2022 Digest Issue of The Classroom Astronomer Newsletter-Inbox Magazine!
Much of the past month(s) have been spent listening to talks—about astronomy news, education, robotic/remote telescopes—in Europe and the USA. The past issues have been filled with detailed articles on using remote telescopes, and educational teachniques, resources, and more. If you’d like the full details, subscribe to the Full Editions of the Newsletter! You can read everything in the Archives!
- - - -
Key websites: Homepage for The Classroom Astronomer, with its index to all Inbox Magazine issues’ contents, by celestial object, educational subject area, grade level or venue, and with complete Tables of Contents:
https://www.classroomastronomer.com . Not a Full Paid Subscriber? Become one by putting your email in the box below (and then you’ll have access to the Archive of all past issues!).
The ultimate home of our Universe — Hermograph Press — has its homepage at: www.hermograph.com and its Store, for educational materials and books, is at: www.hermograph.com/store .
Thanks for subscribing!
Publisher -- Dr. Larry Krumenaker
Astronomical Teachniques
NAM: How Not to Do Tactile Astronomy
Dr. Nicolas Bonne, a well known British educator on using tactiles with BVI students, got caught flat footed, like many of us, by the pandemic, perhaps more than the rest of us.
Students who are blind struggled, Bonne said, with the transition and got exhausted quickly. Not only was it no longer safe to use or share tactiles in a group, it wasn’t safe to even send them to the schools. Guiding the use of tactiles via virtual instruction was….challenging.
What worked, Bonne said, was to work with much smaller groupings, essentially one-on-ones, and fewer resources. What the instructors had to do was, surprisingly, leave the cameras on. Students with some remaining visual abilities, even if just light and dark impressions, caught the cues better; have the background uncluttered and your face was easier to see. Also, telegraph more what you are doing verbally, pause less.
For more information on using tactiles, go to www.tactileuniverse.org .
RTSRE: Brightness, Color, Location, for the Blind and Visually Impaired…and Sighted Students!
Another piece on BVI instruction was at the recent Robotic Telescopes, Science Research and Education Conference (RTSRE), where Kate Meredith of GLAS Education presented a “suitcase” of devices she has collected or created to teach BVI students, many of which are equally good for teaching sighted students as well. Some of these would not have been around even a few years ago were it not for 3-D printers of plastic models.
Let’s look at her devices for three basic concepts that astronomers ultimately use to learn about the universe from light—brightness, color, location.
Brightness
Though the stars in the sky truly appear as points, our corneas, lenses, and aqueous humour—the liquid that gives the eye its shape—all distort and enlarge the point source into a visible disk, and the brighter the star the larger the disk. How can you show that? On a map, bigger dots. For the blind, with a magnitude keyboard.
Using an old musical note keyboard, Meredith’s magnitudes are represented by not sounds but the pressure needed to push down the key that represents the magnitude.
Now real brightness is measured not by eye but by electronics—photometers, or photometry on images. GLAS’ demonstration of the latter technique is by using cut-out circles moved over CCD “cell squares” with various amounts of 3-D ‘photons’ that can be counted by touch.
Location
One of the hardest concepts for BVI students is recognizing that above us the sky seems to be a dome. Educator Dr. Amelia Ortiz-Gil of the University of Valencia, Spain, uses a 3-D printer to make small half-domes of the sky showing constellations, with the stars in different sizes to show some magnitude differentiation, dashed lines to show stick-figure constellation outlines and traditional pathways from one place to another, and a velcro-like pattern to show nebulae and directional points.
Color
By far the most developed of the three concepts seem to be color, specifically spectra! And for both sighted and BVI students! Here are some particularly interesting examples educators can use.
A fairly standard colored string/bungee/yarn representing the visual spectrum, mostly anyway, with tighter or looser waves representing the wavelengths and frequencies of the different parts of visible light. This can be both seen by eyes and felt with hands.
A 3-D printed puzzle of similar variations of wavelengths.
A display of titling of the various parts of the electromagnetic spectrum which shows that all the regions are not the same size. a very common misconception. Visual light is a very tiny part of the spectrum, and all colors in it are not equal in size, either. Title lengths with braille can indicate that.
A fourth color usage is most unique! I’ve seen tactile galaxy cards before where the galaxy is the raised image of a photo—the higher the surface the brighter the part of the galaxy—plus other info like its name are printed. The back of the card had a regular photograph for sighted students. But here on the back was a photograph of the galaxy’s spectrum itself with identified element lines!
For more information, contact Kate Meredith at kate@glaseducation.org.
All images courtesy of Kate Meredith though may have been modified to fit the newsletter.
AAS: An Outline for Doing an Astronomy Mastery Course
Nicole Granucci of Quinnipiac University has the typical problem all college astronomy instructors run. Students come to her Intro to Astronomy course with a wide variety of prior astronomy experience and interest, math abilities, and the desire to just ‘check off the requirement’ box. And after trying to do a traditional Astro 101 Survey course and not particularly liking it, she “went rogue.”
Out went the usual history-planets-stars progression, in went five weeks of three topics—the scale of the universe, the tools of the trade and how we measure things, and an intro to light. The rest of the semester was spent with students in groups working from data found in astronomical archives on some research idea they chose. It had to have independent and dependent variables, from which they made plots, and then make a poster presentation. Having a choice in what to study made students more interested in learning, more confident and more learning, stated Dr. Granucci.
Astronomy Remotely
RTSRE: What Kinds of Research Can You Do?
The first thing most do after looking through an eyepiece is learn to take a picture through it. Ditto for most robotic telescopes users. Getting serious, what kinds of astronomical research can you really do with it?
Things in the sky have motions. Pictures can be taken over time and their positions in the coordinate system measured and plotted. One such project is measuring binary stars over time, too, pairs that aren’t always so fully observed yet.
Objects have changes in brightness as well. Cameras can monitor galaxies for supernovae and with appropriate software generate light curves. Indeed, one useful aspect of utilizing robotic telescopes is for rapid response on transient phenomena, such as newly detected supernovae, especially when more professional scopes may be in daylight but a robotic scope on the other side of the world is in darkness. Light curve graphs are needed for lots of less-studied variable stars. Asteroids vary in brightness, too, a sign of rotation. The light curves of eclipsing binaries stars are one of the few ways to get information on the sizes and masses of stars.
An area of great interest in research are the measurement of stars for transits of exoplanets, whether known, suspected or hoping to be discovered. The dips in brightness when a small (compared to the star) planet passes in front of the star is at most 1% of the incoming light. Finding these, like in eclipsing binaries, determines the exoplanet’s orbiting period and size.
AAS: Astronomy Learning for Neophytes Part 1 — SLOOH
Astronomy is known for its great appeal to youth of all kinds and demographics, but it also can be out of reach for many, for financial reasons—afford a telescope? hah!—for social reasons, for light pollution hiding the sky, and more. For educators, there are two programs where students can have a shot at using a telescope remotely on the simplest of goals—learning by observing and completing simple projects. SLOOH is one, LCO another.
SLOOH is a consortium of ten telescopes in Chile and on the Canary Islands that are available for robotic control by individuals, educators and their students. For the last, useful is a set of activities called Quests. Students need to use the telescopes to gather images and complete a collection of them to some specification, usually the filling in of a poster.
The Quests help the student to learn to do science because they have to learn to plan and execute the project. Planning involves which objects to get images of, with which telescope they can schedule time on, which one will be operational with clear weather, where the object is high enough in altitude, where the Moon will not interfere with the observation, and so on. Once you figure these out, you make your reservation and await your image to be made and you get notified of its availability for download and placement in your Quest poster.
The Quests come in three levels, Learning, Observation, and Heritage.
The Learning Quests have three types, a Starter Set (9) for total beginners, a set of 5 on making Measurements, and a set of ten Quests on Discovering. The Starter Quests are basics—exploring about Nebulae, the Solar System, the Milky Way, other galaxy types, sizes of objects, distances. Measurement Quests are about coordinates and such. Discovering Quests go into more interesting astronomy at a basic level—stellar lives, the Sun, lunar features, and more.
Observation Quests are the meat of the service. Here you have more challenges. The Collection area has the explorations of constellations and what objects they contain, whimsical collections such as objects from constellations that are all birds, collecting images of all the giant planets and their moons, or all the phases of our Moon.
Moments are special events, like eclipses and the Grand Conjunction. Footsteps Quests are historically based. You seek to get images of all the Apollo landing sites, or replicate Clyde Tombaugh’s discovery images of Pluto’s movements among the stars.
Currently there are only six Heritage Quests, which include such things as monitoring Algol, the first known eclipsing variable. This is the rare true scientific observing on SLOOH, where you make real observations of things happening.
After this, you should be ready to do your own, real research!
There is a downloadable PDF showing how each Quest correlates with Next Generation Science Standards, Common Core Math, K-12 Computer Math standards, and the free OpenStax Astronomy Textbook chapters.
Also, this is not a free service but for individuals and home schoolers, it is not unreasonable. A $9.99 per month account gets one master account and 4 sub-accounts. A basic Educator account is $199 per year and includes 3 student sub-accounts and 1000 reservations for use.
RTSRE: Astronomy Learning for Neophytes Part 2 — Las Cumbres Observatory (LCO)
Las Cumbres Observatory (LCO) has its version of Quests; it’s called SEROL’s Cosmic Explorers.
LCO is a much wider network of telescopes. Where SLOOH was in two locations, LCO is in seven: Texas, Hawaii, Tenerife Island in the Atlantic, Israel, South Africa, Australia, and Tibet in China, at least 26 telescopes (the numbers differ in various publications and webpages) ranging from 0.4-meter diameter to 2-meter. The images taken are scheduled by SEROL, an acronym for ‘Scheduling Efficiently and Roboticaly on LCO’. The main URL is lco.global.
SEROL’s Cosmic Explorers is a set of 3 Missions with multiple challenges. In each Mission, students have to make observations of various objects and do simple analyses, basically examining them by eye and answering questions.
The three Missions are 1. Getting to Know the Night Sky; 2. Light and Times of Stars; and 3. The Universe at Large. These Missions are for ages 8 and up, but do appear very much at the elementary level, much lower than SLOOH Quests. But unlike the Quests, there are no costs whatsoever. You use LCO’s SEROL scheduler (illustrated as a cartoonish robot) to obtain your own photograph (never a previously taken one) and within seven days you are sent the result.
While you wait, there are coloring sheets, some movies and a video game. When you get the photo you requested *for each challenge* you have 3-4 questions to answer on it.
If you answer all correctly, you earn a ‘sticker’ for within the Mission. Once you complete the first Mission, you get a ‘badge’ and you can go on to Missions 2 and 3. You can access the Missions at https://serol.lco.global .
- - - -
There are other educational activities on the LCO website, though most are at the elementary and middle school level and many are not done with the LCO telescopes, such as making a model landing craft for an ‘astronaut’ or making impact craters. Some more advanced activities use LCO data to find exoplanets in photometry data, plotting light curves of supernovae or asteroids, or to use Photoshop or other software to work with color in astrophotographs.
Connections to the Sky
AAS: Hawaii’s Moving Model Solar System
If you have to social distance, you might as well walk in the empty spaces between the planets of the Solar System, right? In Hawaii, you can do that, and learn the local language as well. A joint project of the Canada-France-Hawaii and Keck Telescopes at Mauna Kea Observatories, this Hawaii model solar system is set up in various places on the islands for limited times, using printed placards or decals.
Each planetary placard lists the name of the planet (and the Sun and the asteroid and Kuiper belts) in English and Hawaiian; for example, Mars is ‘Ula’ula ‘o Hoku’ula which means Mars is Red; the Sun in Hawaiian is ka la. Basic planetary information such as distance, gravity, composition, and more can be learned from a short video brought up on your smart phone via reading the placard’s QR code.
This webpage, https://www.cfht.hawaii.edu/en/outreach/solarsystemwalk, contains links to the Solar System Walk coloring sheets and a Mini Solar System Walk, and the placard’s QR codes videos. They are happy to share materials.
AAS: Astronomer Biography Calendar
Sometimes you don’t need a what to celebrate but a who, and here’s a place to find a who. Dr. Thomas Hockey put up a poster display concerning astronomer birthdates for every day of the year, and what their big claim to fame was, or is. See who’s birthday you can make a lesson out of and celebrate by visiting https://scholarworks.uni.edu/datasets/3/ . You download these as Excel files, either for the month or the year.
AAS: USNO Sky Information
….Oldies but (as) goodies (as it gets in the world), and also online, try these for the most accurate sky information around. Use the QR code in the image.
First Webb Photos’ Look-Back Times and Distances
The first Webb telescope photograph shows the SMACS 0723-73 Galaxy Cluster, with gravitational lensing, over 4 billion light years distant. Not the farthest photographed object ever taken. But it brings in a natural discussion towards how far things are, as in “what’s a light year anyway?” A second question becomes “Is that how old the light we see is?” The answer to the first question all astronomy teachers know. The second one is usually the same as the first answer, until you get to REALLY far things.
Start with this table, based on one shown at the Royal Astronomical Society annual meeting, on light years and look-back time and history:
Notice the last two items. Distance and look-back times aren’t always the same! The explanation is below the table. The objects let their light go, but the objects are no longer where we see them now.
If you like you could add in the other First Images. In order of distance, they are:
WASP-96b (Webb obtained the spectrum only), 1150 light years (ly).
Southern Ring Nebula, 2500 ly.
Cosmic Cliffs Nebula in Carina, 7600 ly
Stephen’s Quintet, 290 million ly (for four of them, one is a 40 million ly, a foreground galaxy).
And the SMACs galaxy cluster.
Finding historical events for some might be a good historical, interdisciplinary activity. I found…:
What happened in the year 872 AD? (King Alfred was ruling England and fortifying London.)
478 BC? (The last of the Greek armies that had defeated the Persians at Plataea returned home.)
5578 BC? (Good luck!)
AAS: Planetary Radar for Students
The great Arecibo Radio Telescope may have fallen but its legacy lives on. One of those is its massive library of radar signals to, and reflected back from, planets and asteroids, which students can use to make models of the planetary bodies.
Flavianne Venditti described the Arecibo Observatory (AO) Planetary Defense Radar program which was designed for several purposes, including to aid in the planetary defense program, that is, monitoring for near-Earth objects (NEOs), and to characterize small planetary objects physically and dynamically.
Various onsite research opportunities are available there, but the data is available to anyone. Here are the four main URLs for the Planetary Radar Program and educational and data services:
Arecibo Planetary Radar Outreach Website https://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/asteroids
STAR Academy (PR 9-12th graders) https://www.naic.edu/stars/
REU Program https://www.naic.edu/REUT/
Planetary Radar Science https://www.naic.edu/~pradar
AAS: Summer Internships in Astronomy
School starts in August for many and that’s already the start point for students who plan ahead for the next year, and next summer. An AAS conference talk on getting a leg up for students in countries with few astronomical facilities listed a massive amount of summer internships! They are mostly for undergraduates but some may handle high schoolers or rising seniors. Here’s the slide—you’ll have to Google the names and find the URLs yourself; a good student will be motivated to do so, right?
The RAP Sheet - Research Abstracts for Practitioners
What’s in the scholarly astronomy education journals you can use NOW.
H. Ollé and T. Kovács. (2022). What Hides Within a Photograph: Analysis of a Light Curve in the Classroom. Physics Education, 57, 5. June 10. (Online) September (print). https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6552/ac68c3
Sometimes it is really nice to see a work in the academic journals that simply gives you everything you need to solve a problem.
There is a lot of research, both professional and with students, being done on exoplanets with various sized telescopes, involving transits of the worlds across the star, causing tiny eclipses. But how do you get the sizes of the exoplanet, or its orbital characteristics? These two Eastern European astronomer-educators give you the basics, clearly, specifically, transit duration, planet-to-star radius ratio, orbital period, semi-major axis and star mass. The explanations and final equations usable to calculate the values are included in the article in easy to comprehend prose.
2. J. Wilhelm, M. Cole, E. Driessen, S. Ring, A. Hightower, J. Gonzalez-Napoleoni and J. Jones. (2022). Grade Level Influence in Middle School Students' Spatial-Scientific Understandings of Lunar Phases. School Science and Mathematics Journal, 122, 3, pp.128–141. April 10. https://doi.org/10.1111/ssm.12519 .
Here is an example of something that was a really good idea….for a pilot study….but in this reviewer’s opinion should never have been published beyond a conference poster session.
The hypothesis to explore….when is it a good time to really teach lunar phases, during 6th, 7th or 8th grade (US grade levels), evaluating this against the times when the students’ minds go through the changes in spatial abilities. Their results were that the sixth graders did better in learning than the eighth graders…The problem here is the sample is just too small, two sets of classes (though numbering in the 100-200 students each) in two different states. The statistical problem of small samples.