The Classroom Astronomer Newsletter Digest June, 2022
The Classroom Astronomer Newsletter Digest June, 2022
The Lesson of the Non-‘Storm’; Model Solar Systems--in Sky--on Earth; Monitoring Mira; The OTHER 14 Zodiac Constellations; Retro Space Game; AstroPix; Teachniques--A New HR, Legit Sci Sources; More!
Cover Photo - Sun and Son
In This Issue:
Cover Photo - Sun and Son
Editorial - The Real Lesson to Learn from the Meteor ‘Storm’
Welcome to the TCA June Digest
Sky Lessons -
- ‘Wonderful Cetus’ This Summer
- Planets All In A Row in the Sky, in the Dawn; Planets Out of the Ecliptic PlaneConnections to the Sky -
- Planets All In A Row, on Earth
- A Space Game for Grandpa/Grandma?
- AAS: Astropix
- Heliophysics’ Big YearAstronomical Teachniques -
- AAS: A New Way to Teach the HR Diagram
- AAS: The Write StuffArticle - AAS: What to Know About Astronomy in Community Colleges
The RAP Sheet -
- Teaching Mars Literature
- Total Eclipses of the Sun as Depicted in the Modern Popular Literature
NOTE: ALL articles have been truncated from their original forms and sizes, or summarized, in order to fit in the Digest.
Welcome to the June 2022 Digest of The Classroom Astronomer Newsletter-Inbox Magazine!
June has been an astronomy conference month! It started with the American Astronomical Society (AAS), then the Radio Telescope, Student Research and Education (RTSRE), and as I write this, the European Astronomical Society (EAS) will start tomorrow. There has been SO MUCH information from the first two meetings, enough to practically carry TCA through the summer, and there are more conferences coming in July through September!
In education, we look a little deeper at a side-effect of the Grand Line-Up, still ongoing though past its peak—the fact that the planets don’t actually line up, nor are they ON the Ecliptic itself. In fact, some aren’t even in the traditional zodiac constellations. The number of THOSE might astound you!
Meanwhile, on Earth, there are line-ups that don’t disappear—over a hundred Model Solar Systems (MSSs). We have a few activities you can do with them, too, and have created an online, collated list of the sites all over the world.
Other topics—a look at the July peak of the variable star Mira, and the non-peak of the ‘May Meteor Storm”; a retro space game from NASA. Some reporting of AAS stories: Astronomical Teachniques—writing for success, a new way to teach the HR diagram; Connections to the Sky; and a detailed look on who makes up, and what helps, astro students at community colleges. Two RAP Sheet reviews involve books—using Mars science fiction, and eclipses in literature.
Enjoy!
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Editorial - The Real Lesson to Learn from the Meteor ‘Storm’
May 30-31st, 2022. Hundreds, perhaps even thousands of meteors per hour for a brief time, woo hoo!
Then the drop from the astronomical sugar high….no storm.
My experience was: one hour, 5 ‘tau herculids’; with corrections for radiant altitude and sky area a rate of perhaps 20-25 meteors/hour. Just a moderate shower.
The best lesson from this would have been — and should be next year, or next time there is hype — to point out how neat this is, not because it will be A STORM, but because this is the debris from a cometary outburst that occurred and seen IN OUR LIFETIMES. Many of you might have observed this with your own eyes in 1995. That’s cool! This wasn’t ancient history, and we didn’t need to raise expectations with hype. Teach and promote the cool reality. -LK
Sky Lessons — ‘Wonderful Cetus’ This Summer
Look southeast of red Mars about 15 degrees for another red star. Use binoculars for now. If you find it, you’ll be looking at Mira, “The Wonderful," the first recognized long-period variable star (LPV), or Mira variables. These are old red giant stars that take roughly a year to cycle from a deep, faint minimum brightness to maximum and back down again.
Mira, or Omicron Ceti, is nominally expected to be peak at magnitude 3.4, not too bright nor too faint, but being in a bright-star-poor region of the sky it should stand out, especially with its red color. Neither the periodicity nor brightness peak is clockwork perfect. Monitoring it is a good summer school observing project. On the right-hand chart, we’ve marked four stars against which you can compare it as it rises and falls around its July 13th predicted peak.
Planets All In A Row, In The Sky; Planets Out of the Ecliptic Plane
From about June 2nd until around July 10th there was/will be a (model) solar system in the dawn sky—all the planets (other than Earth) lined up in proper order. This time frame is controlled by when Mercury is visible at least 45 minutes before sunrise, with all the others are already up by then.
We’ll have a quasi-ordering of the naked-eye worlds continuing into August. Once Mercury leaves, then Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn maintain their positioning, until Saturn sets before morning twilight after mid-August.
Planets Out of the Plane
Let us use the planets all lined up to find the constellations of the Ecliptic, shall we? At the end of June, the planets—
Mercury and Venus are both in Taurus,
Mars is in Pisces,
Jupiter is in Cetus……
Whoa, wait, what? Cetus!?
As those of you who may follow The Galactic Times newsletter know, we take great joy in discussing the foibles of the astrological signs versus reality. Earlier this spring we delighted in telling the tale of the Sun spending part of a March day in Cetus, which makes Cetus the 14th sign of the astronomical zodiac (Ophiuchus is the 13th).
But that technically is the Earth’s doing as the Sun’s annual sky motion is merely a reflection of our orbital motion around it—always get that straight with students. The planets don’t follow our rule except in generality. We all orbit the Sun in roughly the same plane, but not exactly.
The Grand Line-Up — The General Ecliptic Plane
As long as you don’t get too picky, you can see the outline of the Plane of the Solar System by connecting the ‘wandering stars’ as they appear in the sky.
But, to be picky, they aren’t in a STRAIGHT line at all. Mercury is a few minutes of arc less of 4 degrees south of the Ecliptic (that gap’s nearly 8 Full Moons). Right now, Saturn is the closest, at 1 degree, ~9 minutes of arc. In fact, ALL the planets are south of the Ecliptic right now!
How far off-line can they go?
This is a two-prong geometry problem. First, how tilted is the planet’s actual orbit, and second, how close to us is that orbit so that we can expand the viewable range by ‘looking at it from above or below its orbit’ (i.e. a parallax effect)? The three largest orbital inclinations are Mercury, 7-degrees, Venus, 3.4-degrees, and Saturn, 2.5-degrees. Add in the parallax effect, and the distance from the Ecliptic varies with how near to Earth the planet is; sometimes that’s a big difference! Venus appears as far as 8.5-degrees from the Ecliptic despite its low inclination value. Mars, next nearest to us, can get as far as 6-degrees. Mercury only ranges as far as 5-degrees, Saturn just 3, and Jupiter a mere 1.5. So the Zodiacal constellations in which you can find planets become anything within about 8 degrees of the Ecliptic.
What Other Constellations are Within 8-Degrees of the Ecliptic?
Let’s call these the Planetary Zodiacal Constellations. In addition to the traditional Twelve and the Extra Two, we have: southern Auriga and northern Orion, also Sextans, mainly. There is a tiny corner of southwest Pegasus within the range. Ditto slivers of northwestern Canis Minor and Hydra (two slivers there, in fact), and slivers in Crater the Cup and Corvus the Crow. Also, the southern part of Serpens Cauda (the eastern part or tail of the Serpent). Finally, a fair chunk of southern Scutum and the tiniest fragment of southwestern Aquila.
Counting just the ones beyond The Fourteen, at least some of the planets can be found in 14 other constellations, a grand total of 28, double the number the Sun can be in. Thank goodness we don’t need to count in Pluto anymore!
Connections to the Sky
Planets All In A Row, On Earth
Teaching about the size of the Solar System can be a bit boring using toilet paper rolls for planet distances or clay ball models for sizes. Real world Model Solar Systems (MSSs) are instructional all year long and make for nice field trips.
The scales of MSSs vary widely, depending mostly on how much linear space the project has to work with, and what size of Sun or Earth they wish to show, and whether the two scales—size and distance— the same or different.
Another factor, surprisingly, is what do you want to include in your model! The oldest models included the Sun and the nine planets. Yes, nine, as including Pluto. But today, Pluto doesn’t count. Do you take it out? What about the asteroid belt? More recent models have tried even to include features such as the dwarf planets beyond Neptune, such as Eris, or the Kuiper Belt, the heliopause, positions of space probes, or the nearest star Alpha/Proxima Centauri.
Where can you find some extant model solar systems? Wikipedia has a 74-count listing within an article on Model Solar Systems around the world. An article in a blog at newlangsyne.com lists 52 in the USA and Canada. None listed the Erftstadt, Germany Planetweg, one yours truly visited while living in Germany. So we felt we had to do something about the problem….
TCA’s Collated List of Model Solar Systems 1.0
We have created and put up a collated 1.0 list of Model Solar Systems around the world on the Classroom Astronomer Homepage, under the Article Collections menu, a 5-page PDF. Here is a screenshot sample of the first of the listings:
Listings are by US State and then alphabetically by country. If you know of others in existence, let us know by emailing us at the address below!
Model Solar Systems, Instructional Activities
One summer I took a 2-year-college astro class to Gainesville, GA. I used the experience as a way for them to make certain kinds of observations, real and proxy, to use in an assignment.
They had to fill in a table of objects (above), using data they found on the plaques. The Gainesville Model Solar System, built for the 2000 millennium celebration, also contains plaques for the Moon, asteroids and Jupiter’s moons.
One assignment was to determine categories for the planets, such as by numbers of moons (Few or Many), or any other categories they could come up with, using only the data on the plaques, which wasn’t necessarily not out-of-date already.
A quantitative exercise was developed to determine the scale of the planets used in the design. Students had to measure the diameters of the existing 3-D models of the planets in the plaques (some had been vandalized or stolen) with rulers and using the diameters given on the plaques. Of course, this would involve some uncertainties, too, but that’s a good thing if you want to indicate to students that all measurements are imprecise. Ultimately, we also wanted to find out, was this the same scale for the planet distances?
Because the trek is 2-kilometers long and crosses streets in a non-linear meandering fashion, measuring the actual distances between plaques wasn’t feasible beyond Earth—the three innermost planets were in the same central square as the Sun. So we invented a proxy. It was reasoned that if we were to walk at a constant pace and in straight lines, our speed between the planets would be a constant and a graph of velocity versus distance/object would be a straight horizontal line. But was it? We pretended we were spacecraft and divided the real miles between the planets by the number of minutes it took to walk to the various worlds and calculated a warp speed, a la Star Trek. These values could also be easily compared to the light-speeds from the Sun to the planets that were known to the class from an earlier assignment. Oh, and we moved at about Warp 9!
We also used the data to determine where Eris (then known as Xena) would have to be, and also Alpha Centauri (nowhere near Atlanta!).
By the way, other uses by other institutions include:
fundraising,
passport stamping at each site (or you get one by driving to each and taking a photo of the planet model there),
audio tours or access to podcasts at each stop of the model,
walk to each planet at light speed (get to Earth in 8 minutes),
do artwork of some kind for each stop.
Model Solar Systems can be much more than a walk in the park.
A Space Game for Grandpa/Grandma?
Roman Space Observer is a retro-to-the-max Web-browser game that has you use your space-bar and arrow keys to capture as many black holes, supernovae, rogue exoplanets, galaxies and other space objects as you can with a pixellated image of the Nancy Roman Space Telescope, all in one minute. Nothing otherwise educational here. See if you or your grand-descendant can have the higher score and get out of doing the dishes. Roman Space Observer Game
AAS: AstroPix
AstroPix is an 8200+ image archive for free use created by NASA’s Universe of Learning program, bringing together massive archives and feeds of images from thirteen sources of ground- and spaced-based observatories. AstroPix images can be found most easily if you know the object’s coordinates or its common name. Other data/filters include image type, subject, spectral band, locale, the telescope facility and the publisher. The image can be not only a photograph, but also an artwork, or a data graph.
AstroPix can be reached at https://astropix.ipac.caltech.edu/ though the shorter astropix.org will get you here too.
Heliophysics Big Year
It is a bit of a propaganda film but it is a useful bit for getting ideas of what you can do to get some things into your classroom about the Sun this year. Watch the film clip on YouTube: https:// www.youtube.com/ watch?v= DVYWwASlOXc .
Astronomical Teachniques
AAS: How About a New HR Diagram?
The HR Diagram is a standard concept in astronomy, the relationship between temperature and luminosity, only it is not obvious, and it uses non-linear scales. It is instructionally confusing for some. So how about a different way to graph it?
In a poster session, Dr. Anne Tabor-Morris of Georgian Court University, NJ proposed a simple change, reverse the X-axis to go from cool to hot, left to right, and re-plot the stars on that scale.
What you get seems more logical to her students. As you go from red to blue, you also go (mostly) from less luminous to more luminous. Blue hot in astronomy is definitely a hotter color than red (see Rigel versus Betelgeuse).
AAS: The Write Stuff
Dr. Chris Impey of the University of Arizona probably teaches more students in one semester than most people teach in a decade. in very large university classes and in massive open online courses, or MOOCs. For both of these, what can make the difference between passing or failing?
One factor at least: writing. What he and his team are trying to do is develop a machine learning program that helps students identify legitimate sources of information and know which are misinformation, for use in their writing assignments.
Statistically, Impey has found that more successful course completions are done by those who finish 1 to 4 written assignments, than none. So getting students to write at all is the first step. Writing correctly with proper sourcing is the next step.
Article — AAS: What to Know about Astronomy in Community Colleges
Two talks on Community College astronomy at AAS were Simon Steel’s on NASA’s Community College Network through the SETI organization (nccn.seti.org) and Z. Richards and A. Kelly’s, called “Exploring Predictors of Community College Astronomy Performance.” The statistics were remarkably similar.
Females were 57% and 54%, in order of the talks above. Hispanics were 26 and 19%, respectively. African, 13 and 8%. The number of students taking astronomy nationwide were 300,000 and 250,000.
Separately, NASA found that 15% were single parents, 29% were the first of their family to be in college, and only 23% of astronomy instructors had astronomy degrees. Richards and Kelly found 85% were in non-STEM majors, 65% were part-timers, and the average age was 27.
A finding of the latter’s research was that demographics were not a predictor of success. The number of prior math courses and the performance in them was the most significant predictor of success. Only 33% had had algebra.
The RAP Sheet - Research Abstracts for Practitioners
What’s in the scholarly astronomy education journals you can use NOW.
J. Lockard and P. Goggin. (2022). Teaching Mars Literature. Science & Education. Online: March 30. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-022-00333-3
The Arizona State astronomers who authored this article put together not a literature review but a use of a set of novels that serve both as a look at how we have looked on the Red Planet as a place, and its purported denizens and our colonization of the two, and as a mirror of the Earthly society that created the books. From the study’s abstract, “after an introduction, …Americanist conceptual approaches, anti-colonialism, habitat sustainability, and pedagogical possibilities for future discussion of Mars literature. The paper argues for a fiction-based approach to understanding historical and potential future relationships with Mars and Mars science.” But it is not the books themselves that is those themes that they contain they investigate. The books were H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Princess of Mars, Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, Phillip K. Dick’s Martian Time-Slip, Greg Bear’s Moving Mars, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars.
This is an enjoyable and thoughtful piece for anyone who wants to bring space exploration out of the gee-whiz and into the what-if, for-real.
2. Hockey, T. Poster presentation at AAS 240. Total Eclipses of the Sun as Depicted in the Modern Popular Novel. June 2020.
Hockey asks the research question, “Following the total solar eclipses of 1999 and 2017, did the quantity and quality of book length fiction, which includes in its narrative an historical total eclipse of the Sun, increase in the English-speaking world?”
Using the Amazon Kindle library, Hockey came up with a list of ten, nine of which he found to be have geographical and scientific accuracy of what was viewed (solar and eclipse phenomena [e.g. corona, shadow bands], viewing techniques and eye safety, environmental effects such as birds chirping, and so on) and was spot on in all or most books. All the books were under 300 pages and cost less than $8 each. This may be useful for teachers for teachers for the upcoming annular and total eclipses in 2023 and 2024.
Books included The Eclipse, by C.J. Petit, Shooting the Sun by Max Byrd, After the Eclipse by Fran Dorricott and Illegal Alien by Robert J. Sawyer.