Some of the varied astronomy teaching methods are examined here, starting with Paul J. Francis's paper, Using games to teach astronomy.

I have been experimenting with using role-playing games to teach introductory university astronomy. The idea is this: rather than simply telling students about some topic (e.g., the climate of Venus), I tell the class to “imagine that you are world experts on Venus, gathered together here at great expense to solve the baffling mystery – why is Venus so much hotter than the Earth?” The class is divided into small groups, and each group is given a briefing paper. A group, for example, might be experts on infrared radiation, or atmospheric transparency, with their briefing paper giving them a set of clues on this topic (along with lots of red herrings – to teach students the art of extracting meaningful information from noise).

No single briefing paper contains enough information to solve the puzzle – students have to wander around the room, exchanging clues, and slowly putting together a plausible theory, which they then present to the rest of the class.

How does it work? Fabulously well, in general. It really gets students thinking, and interacting with each other. It permanently changes the whole classroom dynamic. At first there was concern that studentswould go berserk (and a security guard once tried to close down one of these lectures, thinking it was a riot in progress), but even poorly motivated high-school students seem to find these exercises interesting enough to keep their attention.

Teachers are the key element in effective teaching and learning of astronomy. Yet very few teachers have any background in astronomy or astronomy teaching. At the elementary school level, very few teachers have any background in science at all. How much astronomy should teachers know? How should they learn it? This leads to another important issue: many teachers, especially at the elementary level, have science and mathematics “anxiety,” and may transmit this anxiety to their students. It's important for teachers to have and transmit interest and enthusiasm. How can these desiderata be built into pre-service teacher education?

In Chapter 10, Mary Kay Hemenway addresses the complex topic of pre-service teacher education. Like the curriculum, teacher education varies greatly from one country to another, and even within a single country.

There are two models of teacher education: concurrent and sequential. In the concurrent model, teachers receive their content courses and pedagogy courses concurrently. The advantage is a greater integration of content and practice. In the sequential model, teachers receive a regular undergraduate degree along with hundreds of other students who are generally not prospective teachers. It may be very frustrating for prospective teachers to take science courses that are taught by the traditional lecture, textbook, and regurgitation exam method, and then to learn in teachers' college that this is not a very effective approach and that, further, this method is rarely used in schoolteaching! Of course, one of the great anomalies of the education system is that college and university instructors seldom receive any pre-service or in-service training in teaching and learning.

Astronomy is a subject that poses many deep questions that intrigue students. If presented in a relevant and stimulating manner it can effectively engage gifted and talented school students. Numerous international and Australian schemes utilize astronomy as a means of challenging and extending such students. The challenge is to learn from the successful schemes and build on them so that more students have access to them.

There is much debate in educational circles as to what constitutes a gifted student. However, Gagné's Differentiated Model of Giftedness and Talent is one that is widely used by educational bodies and so can serve as a means of definition. In this model (Gagné, 1996), gifted students have an aptitude in the top 15 per cent of their age peers in one or more of the following domains: intellectual, creative, socioeffective, sensorimotor and “others.” Talents are skills (or abilities) and knowledge in one or more domains that have been carefully and systematically developed so that students perform in the top 15 per cent of their age group.

David McKinnon: Astronomy is an ideal integrative field. We alienate teachers enough by treating it as a “subject,” one in which they feel that they have no “expertise.” This is especially the case in primary schools where the teachers “teach” all of the “subjects” in the primary curriculum. Integration can happen by employing a thematic approach to the “teaching” of astronomy, which is driven by the students' interest.

Carlson R. Chambliss: I teach astronomy in a small university in Pennsylvania that has a planetarium. Pennsylvania is an unusual case due to the presence of Spitz Laboratories, the leading manufacturer of planetariums in the state. There are far more planetariums in Pennsylvanian secondary schools and colleges than anywhere else in the USA or elsewhere. High school planetarium directors usually do K–12 (6–17 year-olds) planetarium sessions.

Jayant Narlikar: By and large, astronomy in Indian schools is introduced as an appendage to geography. It hardly does justice to the scope of the subject or to the curiosity of the student. My experience with the numerous postcards I receive from secondary school students is that they have read a lot on the descriptive aspects of astronomy but would like to know the “why” behind them. As such I feel that O and A level physics will be a suitable stage when the “astrophysics” part could be introduced to the students.

Estimating Betelgeuse

Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto in 1930, began his career with astronomy on a Kansas farm. To brighten up one long day of farming he asked himself, “How many cubic inches are there in Betelgeuse?” His answer, with what we know today, would have been 10 to the 41st power! On the next clear night he looked skyward, with a twinkle in his eye, to the reddish chief of Orion. One of its secrets given away, Betelgeuse twinkled back.

Orion is master of the winter sky. From city sky or country, from almost any part of the world, the majestic figure of the Hunter dominates the sky with belt, sword, and club. Look to the southeast early in a January or February evening, or to the south in a March evening, and discover Orion. The keys to this constellation are the three stars that line up in a neat row. The westernmost one is called Mintaka, a delightful Arabic name meaning belt. Using the belt as a beacon, Betelgeuse is one of the easiest stars in the sky to find. The three stars in a row are surrounded by a four-sided figure of four bright stars. The star in the northeast corner of the figure is Betelgeuse. The best time to see Betelgeuse is at the end of January, when it is in the sky most of the night.

The sole poster in Part VI is entitled Introducing astronomy through solar and lunar calenders and comes from Moedji Raharto.

In Indonesia, the lack of competence of many teachers in basic science, astronomy, and space science implies that knowledge of astronomy and space science will be transmitted to the young generation improperly.

Priority in a curriculum of basic science includes only a small amount of general astronomy. The public perception is that astronomy is less important than basic science. Both of these points create a disadvantage for the developing astronomical community in Indonesia, a country with more than 230 million people.

The Muslim community in Indonesia has a tradition of using the lunar calendar to determine the first day of the important months Ramadhan, Syawal and Dzulhijjah. Recent disputes over determining the first day of these months is partly due to a lack of understanding of how the exact time of the first visibility of the lunar crescent is calculated by astronomers.

The challenges of introducing astronomy to a wider community with little background concerning astronomical education was discussed in this paper.

What is the first thing you notice about the stars? Quite likely, it is their differing brightnesses. Although this appears obvious, it is the single most important concept with which you should become familiar before you can be a variable-star observer.

Magnitude

Why do stars differ in brightness? Is it because they are at different distances from us, so that the farther stars appear fainter, like the glow from lamps at the far end of the street? Or are the stars themselves of different brightnesses? As you have likely guessed, both are correct. Sirius, a blue star off the southeast corner of Orion the Hunter, is normally the brightest star in the night sky, not so much because it is actually large and bright, but because it is close. At a mere 8 light years away, Sirius is one of our nearest neighbors. However, there exists a star only a little farther away; Wolf 359 is a “red dwarf” star whose intrinsic brightness is so low that it cannot be seen with the unaided eye. Famed in Star Trek legend as the site of a Borg battle, Wolf 359 is a red dwarf star. Meanwhile, the brightest star in Cygnus the Swan, Deneb, is well over 1000 light years away from us, and is one of the intrinsically brightest stars in the sky. S Doradus is even brighter, but it appears to us as a faint star because it is so far away, actually in a neighboring galaxy.

The quantity and quality of the astronomy that is taught in our schools has a critical impact on the health of astronomy. It affects the recruitment and training of future astronomers. It affects the awareness, understanding, and appreciation of astronomy by the citizens who, as taxpayers and decision-makers, support our work. They form the society and culture within which we operate. In many countries, astronomy does not appear in the school curriculum at all; in other countries, it has a place in the curriculum, but the curriculum may be flawed, or teachers may have neither the training nor the resources to present it effectively. Much is known about effective teaching and learning of astronomy. Very little of this knowledge is implemented in schools and universities. Rather, teaching may be ineffective; it may sometimes intensify misconceptions, and may create an incorrect or negative impression of our subject.

Yet we live in a golden age of astronomy. In the last half-century, astronomers have explored dozens of planets and moons in our solar system, and astronauts have set foot on one moon - ours. Astronomers have discovered over a hundred planets around other stars. They have learned much about the life cycle of stars, including their bizarre end products - white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes. On a wider scale, they have mapped the universe of galaxies and, in the twenty-first century, they have determined the age, shape, and composition of the universe with unprecedented accuracy. We have begun to understand our cosmic roots: the origin of our universe, our galaxy, our star, and our planet, and of the atoms and molecules of life.

Observations of gravitational radiation from black holes and neutron stars promise to dramatically transform our view of the universe. This new topic of gravitational-wave astronomy will be initiated with detections by recently commissioned gravitational-wave detectors. These are notably the Laser Interferometric Gravitational wave Observatory LIGO (US), Virgo (Europe), TAMA (Japan) and GEO (Germany), and various bar detectors in the US and Europe.

This book is intended for graduate students and postdoctoral researchers who are interested in this emerging opportunity. The audience is expected to be familiar with electromagnetism, thermodynamics, classical and quantum mechanics. Given the rapid development in gravitational wave experiments and our understanding of sources of gravitational waves, it is recommended that this book is used in combination with current review articles.

This book developed as a graduate text on general relativity and gravitational radiation in a one-semester special topics graduate course at MIT. It started with an invitation of Gerald E. Brown for a Physics Reports on gamma-ray bursts. Why study gamma-ray bursters? Because they are there, representing the most energetic and relativistic transients in the sky? Or perhaps because they hold further promise as burst sources of gravitational radiation?

Our focus is on gravitational radiation powered with rotating black holes – the two most fundamental predictions of general relativity for astronomy (other than cosmology). General relativity is a classical field theory, and we believe it applies to all macroscopic bodies.

The best way to get a good start on observing is to discover the stars for yourself. Becoming familiar with the sky – on your own terms – is an important first step toward useful observation.

We do need a place and time to start, so let's try your backyard, under an evening sky of late spring or early summer. High in the west will shine the seven bright stars of the Big Dipper, possibly the best known asterism, or group of stars, in the entire sky. Since Roman times they have been part of Ursa Major (UMa), the Great Bear. The Dipper's handle represents the tail of the Bear, while the feet and nose are shown by fainter stars to the south and west of the bowl (Fig. 1.1).

The Dipper as a road sign

Much as I have tried, I have never seen a bear in the region of Ursa Major, or a plough. The seven stars of the Big Dipper, however, are easy to spot. At any time of night and in any season of the year, the two stars at the end of the Dipper's bowl point towards Polaris, the North Star. All the stars in our sky, the Sun included, circle the celestial poles, and for our lifetimes Polaris will stay within a degree of the true North Celestial Pole. Polaris is the brightest star of another constellation, Ursa Minor or the Little Bear.

Someone may have once told you that astronomy calls for large, expensive equipment. You may even have flipped through the pages of an astronomy magazine in amazement at all the fantastic technology on display there. At some point in your development as an astronomer, you may feel that a telescope will build your interest and extend the power of your observations. But for now, you are probably much better off with a simple pair of binoculars, and this is true for viewing some of the most interesting variable stars, the large, bright “semiregular” stars. Because binoculars are mass-produced and sold almost everywhere, they are far less expensive than are telescopes, even those of the same size. By taking advantage of both your eyes, binoculars present the sky in an efficient, almost three-dimensional way.

Choosing binoculars

The only problem with binoculars is that the two small telescopes that form their optical system must be precisely aligned. So many binoculars lose their adjustment with the bumps and insults of regular use. Before you buy, test the binoculars by pointing them to a distant building or mountain. Holding them securely, make certain that the image in one side is precisely the same as that in the other; landmarks should fall in the same place in both circular fields of view. If the distant object, like mountain or telephone pole, is in the center of one field but near the edge in the other, then the binoculars are out of alignment.

Z Ursae Majoris and the AAVSO method

A huge red giant, Z Ursae Majoris displays some unusual behavior in this late stage of its life. Although it usually ranges from magnitude 6.5 to 8.3, it occasionally surprises us. Once I watched it drop to 9.5, more than a full magnitude below its normal minimum.

With the earlier starter stars we used a simple method where “1” represents the brightest and “5” the faintest. Now that we have some understanding of what the process means, we need not use it; now we are going to play the variable star game by the rules as outlined by the American Association of Variable Star Observers.

Look closely at the two charts (Figs. 8.1 and 8.2) for Z Ursae Majoris. Figure 8.1 is designed for binoculars and has north up. Figure 8.2 is meant for Newtonian viewing where the image is usually inverted. South is up, north down, and east and west are exchanged.

In Fig. 8.1 you recognize the Big Dipper, and near the top of the bowl is the circle-and-dot symbol for the variable star. Near other selected stars are numbers like 66, 54, and 64. These numbers represent magnitudes and tenths, but the decimal point is left out to avoid confusion with the other points that represent stars. Therefore, read “66” as “6.6” and so on.

A torus surrounding a luminous black hole receives black hole spin energy for reprocessing in various emission channels. A balance between spin energy received and energy radiated allows a torus to remain in place for the duration of rapid spin of the black hole – a suspended accretion state[569]. Amplification of this “seed” field to superstrong values requires a dynamo action in the torus. Conceivably, this dynamo is powered by black hole-spin energy in a long-lasting suspended accretion state.

In this chapter, we derive a bound on the magnetic field energy that a torus of given mass can support. It defines a black hole luminosity function in terms of the angular velocity and mass of the torus, both relative to the angular velocity and mass of the black hole. The torus is compact and lives around a stellar mass black hole. The competing torques of spin-up by the black hole and spin-down by radiation promote a slender shape. This raises the questions: What is the lifetime of rapid spin of the black hole and its luminosity? What are the radiation energies emitted by the torus?

A thousand years ago

There is something magical about a star that, in its final phase of life, announces its end to the entire Universe. On July 4, 1054, Chinese skywatchers were stunned by something new in the sky. The “guest star” they reported was the outburst of a supernova, triggered by a major instability and collapse within the star. Since then at least three other supernovae have been easily visible from Earth, in 1572 and 1604, a time when European civilization was just about ready to accept new thoughts on the stability and arrangement of stars in space, and in 1987, when our understanding of the process of a supernova was finally good enough to be tested.

The Chinese were not the only ones who might have recorded the guest star of 1054. In 1054, native American records consisting of a rock carving in what is now Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, welcomed a bright new star in Taurus with a waning crescent Moon right next to it. More accurate Chinese records have given us information so that we can pinpoint the date of the event as July 4, 1054. Much brighter than nearby Aldebaran, the exploding star would have been visible in daylight.

For a few days around January 4, 2003, the sky put on a repeat performance, as the planet Saturn happened to be precisely at the spot of the supernova of 1054.