TCA #31 - Hawaii’s Movable Model Solar System; +2 more [July 11, 2022, Paid Post]

Astronomy Remotely--Robotic Astronomy for Neophytes Pt 1--SLOOH Quests; Brightness, Color, Location of Stars--Tactiles for Blind/Visually Impaired AND Sighted Students!; A Movable Model Solar System

Jul 12, 2022

∙ Paid

In This Issue:

Cover Photo - Hawaii’s Movable Model Solar System
Welcome to Issue 31
Astronomical Teachniques
- RTSRE: Brightness, Color, Location for the Blind and Visually Impaired…and Sighted Students!
Astronomy Remotely —
- AAS: Astronomy Learning for Neophytes Part 1 — SLOOH
Connections to the Sky -
- AAS: Hawaii’s Movable Model Solar System

Welcome to Issue 31 of The Classroom Astronomer Newsletter-Inbox Magazine!

Forgive me but I’m not in the zone…my usual time zone. I’m straddling the Greenwich Meridian in a way, with part of me in Warwick, UK for the Royal Astronomical Society’s Annual Meeting, and part of me is in Leiden, the Netherlands, at ESOF—EuroScience Open Forum, a kind of all-sciences meeting. Therefore I am up much of the night—NOT observing the sky, which is too often much too hazy or cloudy anyway—and sleeping in the day (which with this heat is a bit weird…..). Writing is insanely complicated. But that’s what afternoons are for, write? Er, right? Enjoy the tactiles, SLOOHing around, and the Hawaiian Walk….

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Publisher -- Dr. Larry Krumenaker

Astronomical Teachniques

RTSRE: Brightness, Color, Location, for the Blind and Visually Impaired…and Sighted Students!

When you get down to it, astronomy is the science of interpreting three things related to those points of light in the sky: their brightnesses, their colors, and their locations, done instantaneously and over time. All we know of the universe comes from this. But what can you do if you can not see these, and how can you teach astronomy if your students can not understand what brightness, color and location mean because they can not see them?

Students who are blind or visually impaired (BVI) are taught with devices involving their other senses, mostly using sonifications or tactiles. At the recent Robotic Telescopes, Science Research and Education Conference (RTSRE), Kate Meredith of GLAS Education (in Wisconsin—GLAS stands for Geneva Lake Astrophysics and STEAM) presented a “suitcase” of devices she has collected to teach BVI students about these concepts, 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 these three concepts.

Brightness

The brightnesses of stars is simply the quantity of photons received. We call the brightness of a star its magnitude. Though the stars in the sky truly appear as points, our eyes’ corneas, lenses, and aqueous humour—the liquid of water, sugars, and other things that give the eye its shape—all distort and enlarge the point source into a visible disk, and the brighter the star the larger the disk. Each magnitude brighter a star is means it is about 2.5 times more intense than the previous magnitude (0 is more intense than 1). 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.

A whole series of these could be used to get ‘magnitudes’ over time and develop, say, the light curve of a variable star.

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.