Related papers: The movement of shadows: a teaching proposal for t…
First part of a didactic sequence of activities on some topics of Astronomy, related mainly with the day and night cycle and the seasons, including the construction of a simplified solar system model and its use as a resource to discuss…
Second part of a didactic sequence of activities on some topics of Astronomy, related mainly with the real shape of the Earth, the gravitational interactions between our planet and other celestial bodies, and the resulting movement of the…
It is a common practice to fix a vertical gnomon and study the moving shadow cast by it. This shows our local solar time and gives us a hint regarding the season in which we perform the observation. The moving shadow can also tell us our…
Both the basic educational contents for students and study programs for science teachers include several topics in physics and astronomy, from the simplest ones to others as advanced as nuclear fusion to explain stellar evolution and…
It is well known that the length and orientation of a shadow cast by a vertical gnomon depends on the time of the day and on the season of the year. But it also depends on the latitude of the site of observation. During the equinoxes, the…
The observation that the shadows of objects change during the course of the day and also for a fixed time during a year led curious minds to realize that the Sun could be used as a timekeeper. However, the daily motion of the Sun has some…
Sundials and gnomons pointing out dates and times are a beautiful reminder of how we understand the movement of the Sun and use it to structure day and year. They also encapsulate the basic astronomical knowledge and concepts of the…
The students are introduced to navigation in general, and, in particular, the skills the medieval people of the Vikings used to navigate on the open sea. The topics of navigation and the Vikings are introduced by questions and a short…
Young children, students, and adults may have alternative ideas about the motion of the Sun and stars as we observe them in the sky. However, a good understanding of this apparent motion is essential as a starting point to study more…
This paper describes a series of activities in which students investigate and use the Ptolemaic, Copernican, and Tychonic models of planetary motion. The activities guide students through using open source software to discover important…
The study of the Universe and all its contents, the physical phenomena and the evolution of the sky objects has always attracted the Humanity. The Astronomy begins to try to explain these things, others sciences too. Therefore, we think a…
We perform a situational diagnosis in topics of astronomy of pre-service elementary teachers in order to try and develop didactic tools that better collaborate with their formal education. In this work we present the instrument we designed…
In the context of the European Erasmus+ project Teaching ASTronomy at the Educational level (TASTE), we investigated the extent to which a learning module at school and a set of activities during a planetarium visit help students to gain…
The aim of this paper is to encourage science educators and outreach groups to look appropriately at the Sun and consider it as an extraordinary pedagogical tool to teach science at all education stages, what we call here as the solar…
The parallel globe is an old, very simple and ingenious device that, when systematically employed in astronomy classes, becomes a teaching tool with great potential. Properly oriented according to the local meridian, this instrument allows…
In this paper we describe a simple conceptual problem, regarding the actual position of the Sun at sunset or sunrise. Although this problem can be easily explained in terms of rotating frames of references and standard Coriolis Effect, it…
We present a modern reconstruction of the classical formula, first derived by medieval Arab astronomers, that describes the trajectory of the tip of a gnomon's shadow during the day as a function of latitude, solar declination, and gnomon…
We extend the single-perturbation approach (developed in our earlier publications for the case of a single map) to the analysis of the shadowing property for semigroups of endomorphisms. Our approach allows to give a constructive…
This chapter provides an overview of the magnetic activity of the Sun and stars, discussing its underlying physical origin, manifestations, and fundamental role in exoplanet studies. It begins with a summary of the Sun's magnetic activity…
In these notes I try to introduce the reader to the topic of axions: their theoretical motivation and expected phenomenology, their role in astrophysics and as dark matter candidate, and the experimental techniques to detect them. Special…