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Arts are a seamless way to introduce the general public to both basic and more sophisticated astronomical concepts. The visual richness of astronomy makes it attractive and easily incorporated in painting and literature. Astronomy is the…
In this work, we present a study carried out to develop a didactic kit based on the use of touch and thermal receivers for the teaching of Astronomy. The proposal arose in the face of the difficulties encountered in the search for…
Light and spectroscopy are among the most important and frequently taught topics in introductory, college-level, general education astronomy courses. This is due to the fact that the vast majority of observational data studied by…
Over the past three decades, we have witnessed one of the great revolutions in our understanding of the cosmos - the dawn of the Exoplanet Era. Where once we knew of just one planetary system (the Solar system), we now know of thousands,…
The dome of Saint Peter's Basilica plays the role of the Moon during a stellar occultation and Arcturus is the target star. This occultation-like phenomenon is useful for introducing to occultation astronomy a class of student up to…
We occasionally include projects in our learner-centered introductory astronomy college course to enable non-science major students explore some astronomical concepts in more detail than otherwise. Such projects also highlight ongoing or…
The occultation of background stars by foreground Solar system objects, such as planets and asteroids, has been widely used as an observational probe to study physical properties associated with the foreground sample. Similarly, the…
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…
Stellar occultations provide a powerful tool to explore objects of the outer solar system. The Gaia mission now provides milli-arcsec accuracy on the predictions of these events and makes possible observations that were previously…
The serendipitous detection of stellar occultations by Outer Solar System objects is a powerful method for ascertaining the small end ($r \lesssim 15$ km) of the size distribution of Kuiper Belt Objects and may potentially allow the…
This chapter of the Planetary Exploration Horizon 2061 Report reviews the way the six key questions about planetary systems, from their origins to the way they work and their habitability, identified in chapter 1, can be addressed by means…
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…
Recent advances in our understanding of the Universe have revolutionized our view of its structure, composition and evolution. However, these new ideas have not necessarily been used to improve the teaching of introductory astronomy…
Batygin and Brown (2016) have suggested the existence of a new Solar System planet supposed to be responsible for the perturbation of eccentric orbits of small outer bodies. The main challenge is now to detect and characterize this putative…
The overarching goal of planetary astronomy is to deduce how the present collection of objects found in our Solar System were formed from the original material present in the proto-solar nebula. As over two hundred exo-planetary systems are…
For centuries, our knowledge of planetary systems and ideas about planet formation were based on a single example, our solar system. During the last thirteen years, the discovery of ~170 planetary systems has ushered in a new era for…
Understanding size and scale (USS) and order-of-magnitude reasoning (OMR) are critical for scientific literacy. This study examines an educational approach to enhance these skills in high school science, considering the cognitive…
Experimental activities are an essential part of physics education. In addition to conveying scientific knowledge, they play a significant role in developing scientific literacy, inquiry skills, and critical thinking. In today's world,…
Sports are a popular and effective way to illustrate physics principles. Baseball in particular presents a number of opportunities to motivate student interest and teach concepts. Several articles have appeared in this journal on this…
The exploration of kilometre-sized trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) is one of the ultimate goals in the search for the origin and evolution of the Solar System. However, such exploration is challenging because these small bodies are too faint…