The Classroom Astronomer Newsletter #14Lite - December 1, 2021
TCA goes to 30 issues!; Eclipse Photo; Sky Lessons; IAU-Shaw--Constellations, Gravity; 50% Off Holidays Sale
Cover Photo - Sky Lessons Dusk and Dawn
Planets and Moon on the evening of December 6, Comet Leonard during December dawns.
In This Issue:
(Italics = Full Subscribers only, in whole or in part)
Cover Photo - Sky Lessons Dusk and Dawn
Welcome to This Issue! - TCA is going to 30 Issues!; Two Additions to Our Revamped Homepage!; New Column.
Article - We —Had—an Eclipse….
Sky Lessons (New Column, Cover Story) - Things You Can Teach at Night with Your Students—Three Planets, and a Comet
Astronomical Teachniques -
IAU-Shaw: The Stars—Making Constellations With Rubber Bands;
IAU-Shaw: Gravity and Space-Time;
IAU-Shaw: Tactile Galaxies, for Sighted and Visually Impaired Together;
IAU-Shaw: Miscellaneous Things Noted.Connection to the Sky - Students LOVE Black Holes and Destruction!
The RAP Sheet – Research Abstracts for Practitioners -
- An Interactive Gravitational-Wave Detector Model for Museums and Fairs;
- The First Paragraph Is As Good As It Gets: STEM Articles in Wikipedia and Opportunistic Learning;
- Development and Application of a Concept Test on the Subject of Stars.The Galactic Times Inbox Magazine #14 Highlights
The Hermograph End of Year/Holidays 50% Off Sale
Welcome to this Lite issue of The Classroom Astronomer Inbox Magazine!
We’re going to be 30!
Starting January 1st, we’ll go from 24 issues per year to 30! We have found ourselves with plenty of material and so we’ll start doing 3 issues in half of the months of the year. To encourage TCALiters to upgrade, we’re running a “30 for $30” subscription promotion. That’s $1 per issue for 2022—a bargain!—and we’ll throw in the remaining December 2021 Full issues for free if you upgrade before New Year’s. Click the link below:
The free TCALite will become a monthly digest of the best of the month’s issues in January.
The Homepage has been upgraded!
On the revamped homepage for The Classroom Astronomer, two new additions since the last issue as I continually revamp and update it to make it more resourceful!
As you know if you checked out our homepage, there’s an index to all (now) 14 Inbox Magazine Issues’ contents by celestial object and educational subject area, and Tables of Contents. Now, each article or Teachnique listed that is on something you can do in your classroom or outreach project is coded with grade level or venue. P for Primary grades, C for College/University, I for Informal Education, and so on.
Second, a Collections page has been added where certain occasional related articles or features are, um, collected and placed into one file for future use and download. First uploaded is a PDF file on the Astronomy in the Next Generation of Science Standards. More special content will be added over time. Come explore !
http://www.classroomastronomer.com
New Column
Starting in this issue, we begin Sky Lessons, things to do with students using sky events. It joins the Astronomy Remotely column on remote observatories you can use as a feature of the now larger TCA.
Subscription site and archive (for full subscribers only):
Publisher -- Dr. Larry Krumenaker
Article: We —Hxaxvxe— had an Eclipse
Two issues ago TCA ran a review of an article on astrophotography with a smartphone. As promised, yours truly’s second attempt to control his camera was accomplished with the November 19th lunar eclipse, and it was much more successful!
The left photo is the view of mid-eclipse through a 2.4-inch refractor at 45X. Right, as seen with the phone held on a camera tripod to shoot the Moon in the sky.
Sky Lessons (New Column!)
As we go from 24 to 30 issues, we’re adding this column to TCA, based on some materials from the sister publication, The Galactic Times. Here we talk about happenings in the sky you can use for real astronomy lessons.
In this two-week period, three planets line up in the western sky, Venus brightest and lowest, Jupiter highest and in the South-southwest, and Saturn, dimmest in the middle. They are equal distant on the 4th. The threesome will compact to a minimum of 31 degrees, mostly due to Venus’ motion eastward along the ecliptic, on the 14th, but Jupiter and Saturn are slowly separating as well. Venus and Saturn are closest on the 16th, at 14 degrees. What can be done here is use that minimum 31 as a way to scale your students’ outstretched hands. How many fists between Jupiter and Venus? Outstretched fingers on the hand? Or use a ruler or meter/yard stick and scale 31 degrees to how many inches/centimeters. THEN measure the planet separations regularly and graph them; watch Venus approach Saturn, then recede from it as it dives towards the Sun by month’s end. How fast do the giant worlds separate as their eastward motions continue? In fact, start early, get measures of Jupiter-to-Saturn, then go back and get real numbers after the hands have been scaled! How far apart ARE they?
- - - - -
Comet Leonard will be a Northern Hemisphere show….briefly….maybe. In the dawn it cuts through the constellation Bootes (sorry, Substack allows no umlauts over the second “o”!), passing a few degrees north (left, in the dawn sky) of bright, orange-y star Arcturus on December 6th, moving towards the Sun, i.e. downward towards the horizon. It is predicted be a 4th-magnitude fuzzball with perhaps a binocular-level tail, technically naked-eye bright though light pollution will easily hide it. The task would be to find it, plot it, and measure the magnitude it actually obtains by comparing it to stars nearby to it, which range from Arcturus’ 1st magnitude to most of the kite-shaped Bootes’ 3-4th magnitude stars.
See the charts above in our Cover Photo.
Astronomical Teachniques
Concluding our series of Teachniques from the Heidelberg IAU-Shaw astronomy education conference….in the next issue we’ll highlight findings from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific meeting.
* IAU-Shaw: The Stars
Perhaps it is a sign of these light-polluted times but there wasn’t a lot in this conference on stars! There were some of the usual ancient stand-by’s of measuring altitudes of objects with quadrants and protractors. The one really unique item I saw was a way to portray the idea of constellations. That, usually, is a cosmic connect-the-dots puzzle, except that there aren’t any visible numbers and the sky doesn’t give you all the dots you need to make a really good image of whatever you want. But one museum exhibitor, Mr. Tan Jihn Harng of Singapore, has a wall with a matrix of pins, and large elastic bands for visitors to connect any two stars together. Then connect those stars to other stars until you have lines that illustrate a star pattern. Perhaps small bungees might be safer.
* IAU-Shaw: Gravity and Curved Space
A very interesting presentation was made by Rick Tonello of the Observatory of Perth’s Gravity Discovery Centre, where a host of gravity-related (of course!) exhibits are on display. Among them is a real tower used to replicate Galileo’s famous Leaning Tower of Pisa ball drops, where he showed that how much mass (and weight) an object has doesn’t change how quickly it falls—all objects fall at the same rate and arrive at the ground simultaneously (excepting for air resistance).
But one key point the Centre apparently tries to consistently make is gravity is not only a Newtonian concept but an Einsteinian one. The Centre has several displays with stretched material in which large balls, representing generic masses, planets, or stars, deform it into a gravitational well. Then smaller balls, such as billiard balls, are sent in motion near the mass, which causes its path to distort, or change into orbiting the larger mass. Tonello demonstrated more beyond this. He could demonstrate gravitational slingshots where a probe is sent past one planet, speeded up, and sent onward to another planet without the aid of booster rockets. Another slingshot he shows is how Apollo 13 was sent around the Moon in such a way that it could automatically return without using its remaining rocket fuel.
Two unique demonstrations I’ve not seen before: First, using the gravitational wells to show ‘photon’ balls being diverted by gravity, therefore showing gravitational lensing of light around massive galaxies (photo below).
The second—stretchable material has a big mass in it such that its well simulates a black hole. Photon balls go in but they don’t come out!
Many demonstrations of Einsteinian gravity concepts abound, but I’ve never seen these demonstrations before! Making gravitational well models with stretchable lycra, balloon plastic, trampoline materials, and other fabrics is almost routine, but if you have one already, try these ideas out!
<Remaining items, for Full Subscribers only>
Astronomical Teachniques -
IAU-Shaw: Tactile Galaxies, for Sighted and Visually Impaired Together;
IAU-Shaw: Miscellaneous Things Noted.Connection to the Sky - Students LOVE Black Holes and Destruction!
The RAP Sheet – Research Abstracts for Practitioners -
- An Interactive Gravitational-Wave Detector Model for Museums and Fairs;
- The First Paragraph Is As Good As It Gets: STEM Articles in Wikipedia and Opportunistic Learning;
- Development and Application of a Concept Test on the Subject of Stars.
In Issue 14 of The Galactic Times Inbox Magazine:
Cover Photo — The Trappist-1 System
This Just In —Where To Build Lunar Bases?;
The Answer is (Water) Blowing in the (Solar) Wind.
Water Elsewhere, Trapped in Trappist-1. (Cover Story)Sky Planning Calendar —
Moon-Gazing - Watch the Evening Moon Pass Three Bright Planets …
* Observing—Plan-et — … Watch Geminid Meteors and Comet Leonard in the Dawn
* Border Crossings — No change! Sun Still in…Where??Astronomy in Everyday Life — A Career in Shipping
Subscribe to it here! It’s Free!
The Hermograph End of Year/Holidays 50% Off Sale.
Every year, Hermograph Press tries to clear its inventory shelves with an End of Year 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 example, there is only a small, limited number of Spectrum Viewers left! And this is the highest the discount will get….
Through December 24th, the discount off any item in the Hermograph Store is:
== 50%, Use Code EOY4. ==
==Astronomy and Education Related Items==
==Historical Tourism Books==
Does not reduce shipping charges or applicable sales tax. Shipping, though, will be free for US orders over $60.
Subscriptions (fee-based) for The Classroom Astronomer are normally $55 per year, but see the announcement at the top of the issue for the “30 for $30” promotion, starting January.
Clicking on the link below can also get you to the FREE option, the soon-to-be-monthly TCA Lite Edition, but in which some articles are available only to full subscribers or others are truncated. Details on other perks for these and Educator Supporter will be found when you click the link….
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