Related papers: Santa and the moon
Illustrations are an essential transmission instrument. For an historian, the first step in studying their evolution in a corpus of similar manuscripts is to identify which ones correspond to each other. This image collation task is…
A model based on celestial geometry and atmospheric physics predicts the dimming and the color of lunar eclipses. Corresponding visual magnitudes and color indices for eclipses from year 2000 through 2050 are listed. The enlargement of the…
This essay demonstrates the key role of Astronomy in Botticelli's "Venus and Mars-NG915" painting, to date only very partially understood. Worthwhile coincidences among the principles of the Ficinian philosophy, the historical characters…
Cosmology education has become an integral part of modern physics courses. Directed by National Curricula, major UK examination boards have developed syllabi that contain explicit statements about the model of the Big Bang and the strong…
Hands-On Universe (HOU) is an educational program that enables students to investigate the Universe while applying tools and concepts from science, math, and technology. Using the Internet, HOU participants around the world request…
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…
Many papers and monographs were written about the modeling the Earth climate and its variability. However there is still an obvious need for a module that presents the fundamentals of climate modeling to students at the undergraduate level.…
The magma ocean concept was first conceived to explain the geology of the Moon, but hemispherical or global oceans of silicate melt could be a widespread "lava world" phase of rocky planet accretion, and could persist on planets on…
We present observations of a solar quiet region obtained by the ground-based Dutch Open Telescope (DOT), and by instruments on the spacecraft SOHO and TRACE. The observations were obtained during a coordinated observing campaign on October…
"Is math useful?" might sound as a trick question. And it is. Of course math is useful, we live in a data-filled world and every aspect of life is totally entwined with math applications, both trivial and subtle applications, of both basic…
The Sun and the Moon are quiescent gamma-ray sources that are clearly detectable in Fermi-LAT data. While moving through the sky, the Sun and the Moon can be a significant background in the analysis of Fermi-LAT data if they pass through…
Upcoming next generation galactic surveys, such as GAIA and HERMES, will deliver unprecedented detail about the structure and make-up of our Galaxy, the Milky Way, and promise to radically improve our understanding of it. However, to…
Cultural astronomy reveals ways in which perception and culture have shaped the interpretation of the night sky.
The surface of Europa experiences a competition between thermally-induced crystallization and radiation-induced amorphization processes, leading to changes of its crystalline structure. The non-linear crystallization and…
Popularized explanations of the color of the sea often prove to be incomplete or oversimplified, and hence inadequate to become acquainted with the phenomenon in its whole. In this paper, after a historical review of the investigations on…
The technological and digital reality has broadly expanded, reaching, in a massive way, spaces, for a century, it is not part of this environment, being a school an example. Therefore, this research has as general objective to develop a…
While the solar system contains as many as about 20 times more moons than planets, no moon has been definitively detected around any of the thousands of extrasolar planets so far. The question naturally arises why an exomoon detection has…
"Everyone knows the moon is made of cheese..." This line, famously uttered by Wallace to his canine sidekick Gromit in the 80s classic, may be one of the most cruelly underappreciated movie quotations of our time. Indeed, while most…
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 aims to shed some more light on one of the best known phenomena in the field of physics, the Doppler effect, in particular, on its classical version. Although, as mentioned, it is a phenomenon already described more than 150…