To Teach The Stars Network - Classroom Astronomer Magazine

Table of Contents

Six Steps To Build Up Student STEMina - If at first you don’t succeed, you’re doing well! Design Buggies for Mars as an elementary (or higher!) science activity and give students mental strength. Using this six-step engineering design pedagogy, which includes testing and improving failed designs, this nine-project plan, NASA's BEST, bridges astronomy, engineering, and critical thinking skills

What Would Galileo Do? A Curriculum Approach - Design a course around Galileo’s discoveries, and his creation of the scientific method.

The Classroom Tablet, or How I Learned to Love Apple in My Astronomy Class - What can you do as a teacher in the classroom with an Apple iPad? For one thing, you can recover from a lack of an interactive Smart Board and do live, graphic demonstrations. Here are some teaching tips for the teacher, on whiteboarding, Moon phasing, 3-D views of the universe, planets and sky, and even some physics, on a tablet device.

Columns:

Astronomy of the Northern Sky - The Brightnesses of Stars - The apparent brightness, or magnitude, of a star is much more precise today than when Hipparchus created the system. How well can you judge brightness? This issue's column looks at the system, showing you stars of exactly whole magnitudes, stars with differences of one or more magnitudes, and tenths of a magnitude (how close a difference can YOU detect?), atmospheric extinction and light pollution measures, and finally measuring the magnitudes of stars that vary, with star charts and a test photo to practice on.

Astronomical Teachniques - The Jig-sawed H-R Diagram; What Kinds of Facts Are There Really?

Photons Focused On - Stonehenge, A Teaching Tool?l - A photo story showing highlights of Stonehenge and a proposed exercise, setting up the Station Stones in your schoolyard to monitor the northernmost and southernmost Sun and Moon rising points.

and

Teachers' Spring Planning Sky Calendar {click here! }

NEXT ISSUE!

Astronomy at 35,000 feet--Flying the Infrared Telescope Jet SOFIA

What's the Correct Order for Teaching Astronomy Topics

and more....

Plus our regular columns:

Astronomy of the North Sky - Coordinates X. Y and Z

The Summer Sky Planning Calendar

for including sky events in your lesson plans.

Astronomical Teachniques

Ring It Up! And Two Comets to Watch!

Jupiter may be brighter but Saturn is now taking the night stage!
The ringed planet rises at sunset as we start this fortnight. Its rings are tilted 18 degrees and so really give the impression of the floating ball within a ring. The planet is at its brightest (and is fairly isolated near no bright stars closeby) as it crosses low across the southern sky all night long.
With the rings at such a tilt (and it will get larger still over the next few years), you can now watch the moon Titan easily in small telescopes make an actual elliptical orbit around the planet. Try observing it for this period of time and see what its orbital period is (how long it takes to return to the starting position. In this regard, Titan is the best moon to observe as Jupiter's bright moons all seem to move from side to side, not around, and all the other planets' moons are too dim.

Jupiter still dominates the western sky with its band of starry brothers in Orion, Taurus, the two Dog Stars, Gemini the Twins' Castor and Pollux, and sunlike yellow Capella. It is moving away from Aldebaran, ruining the 'second eye of the Bull' effect. But it is moving too slowly eastward to escape being swallowed by the solar glare in early June.ht.

Venus is shyly peeking out from behind the skirts of that glare. It first, barely, becomes visible low in the northwestern sky, about 35-45 minutes after sunset, setting quickly. But in the next fortnight it doesn't set for an hour after the Sun sets.

Comet PanSTARRS is still a good binocular object but it is fading. At the same time it is heading straight for Polaris. To find it, you look on line from right side half of the W of Cassiopeia and connected to the peak star in the "roof" of Cepheus, which it will pass almost on top of after May 11th. Because it is passing UNDER the pole star, it has been circumpolar but riding low over the northern horizon. Now it is getting into easy viewing position.

Not too far away is Comet Lemmon but you have to look in the dawn sky, not in the evening. It will be making a straight line parallel to the eastern side of the Square of Pegasus. On May 6, the crescent Moon will be near by with the comet near the lower left corner of the Great Square. Look about 1 and a quarter to one and a half hours before sunrise, just as or before twilight starts. It is about the same brightness as Comet PanSTARRS and, for a while anyway, will be tracking along behind it until it makes a curve to the right.

(Next update ~May 12)

Date	Event	Moon	Mercury	Venus	Mars	Jupiter	Saturn
Apr 28 Su	Saturn is at opposition, rises at sunset, visible all night!
29
30
May 1
2
3			.				\
4

Date	Event	Moon	Mercury	Venus	Mars	Jupiter	Saturn
5 Su
6	Crescent Moon is near Comet Lemmon in the morning sky
7
8
9
10	Annular eclipse of the Sun, Australia; partial in Hawaii.
11	Comet Pan-Starrs just about to nip the top of the "house"pattern of Cepheus.

Icon	Meaning	Icon	Meaning	Icon	Meaning
	Moon visible for early evening studies		Full Moon Night		Moon visible during school hours for study in class
	Visible in evening twilight setting at least 45 minutes after sunset		Becomes visible, as it gets dark, sets later in the evening		Visible during the evening hours, sets before dawn
	Rises or is already up during the evening, visible the rest of the night		Visible in pre-dawn skies until sunrise.		Visible only in dawn, rising at least 45 minutes before sunrise

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Two Week Calendar for Planning Sky Lessons

Ring It Up! And Two Comets to Watch!