never mind the optics

It’s that time of year when people start wondering what to do with S2.  I’ve mentioned this issue here and here in earlier posts.  Last year I looked at a space-related CfE outcome with S2.  I was going to trial a renewable energy topic with this class until one of them told me last week that there was a brilliant series about the solar system starting on BBC2 that weekend and I should watch it.

He was talking about Professor Brian Cox’s Wonders of the Solar System and I had already set my BT Vision box to record the series.  However, the enthusiasm of others in the class to find out more about space, with questions such as “what is the sun?” and “is it true the world will blow up in 2012 and we’re all going to die?” suggested that there was value in trying to follow Prof Cox‘s journey through the solar system.

We’ve got 3 periods a week and some boys have asked if the lesson on Monday could be a repeat of the Sunday evening programme on BBC iPlayer. Here’s the trailer for the series.  Perhaps it will explain why the kids are so interested.

It looks exciting, the presenter is young and beard-free – he was even in a band once.

We’ve toured the solar system using Celestia and, this morning, we started to look at the stars.  My starter question went something like “What’s the brightest star in the sky?” and they told me it was the sun.  Maybe someone tried that trick before, they didn’t say.

The sun apart, we normally consider Sirius to be the brightest star in the night sky.  So how do you find Sirius?  There is a great free programme called Stellarium that will display the night sky.  It turned my smartboard into a planetarium for the duration of the lesson.  Most pupils were able to point towards Orion and I showed them how a line towards the ground from Orion’s belt would lead to Sirius.  Here’s a screenshot of Stellarium.

The funny thing about stars is that they are back to front.  Go into the bathroom and look at your taps.  The red one is for hot water and the blue one is for cold.   But in astronomy the blue stars burn hotter than red ones. Notice in the screenshot above that the bottom right star, Rigel, is shown in a blueish hue while the top left star, Betelgeuse has a red tinge.  Rigel is an incredibly hot and bright star, while Betelgeuse is a lot cooler.

The homework for next week is to go outside and find these three stars in the night sky.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I took the telescope out last night for the first time.  I was specifically interested in finding out whether or not one of my Advanced Higher Physics pupils would be able to the the telescope for her proposed investigation on Jupiter’s 4 largest moons and Kepler’s Laws of planetary motion.

I found a good spot, well away from lights.  If you have Google Earth download this file for the exact location.  I was amazed at just how many stars were visible once I was out of the glare of the town lights.

My finder scope alignment was not as good as I had thought and some small adjustments were necessary to find Jupiter in the eyepiece of the main scope.  I could not believe how bright Jupiter appeared though the scope and was even more impressed when I realised that the four Galilean moons were also present in my field of view.

Adjusting the telescope to track Jupiter gave me some problems due to the vibrations at each adjustment.  The vibrations also gave issues when I tried to capture video using my mobile phone.  I’m going to take the telescope to the local moonwatch events (pdf) at the end of the month to get some advice on how to set up the telescope to minimise vibration.

I tweeted about the experience this morning and mentioned seeing a meteor.  Drew Thomson reminded me that the annual Orionid shower had started a couple of nights ago, with peak activity next Wednesday (21st October), so it’s possible I also caught an early Orionid while I was out.  The cool thing about the Orionids is that they are caused by the Earth passing through the debris left by Halley’s Comet, so you are actually watching little fragments of the comet each time you observe a meteor – much easier than waiting for another 52 years!

Although they are nothing like the photos posted earlier today by Catherine Baker, I thought I would share my attempt at capturing my telescope view of Jupiter with a mobile phone.  I’m afraid it only picked up the planet itself, no moons.

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At the start of this year, my school was lucky to be awarded one of 1000 free telescopes by the Society for Popular Astonomy.  The telescopes for schools competition was designed to mark the International Year of Astronomy 2009, which celebrates Galileo first lifting a telescope upwards to view the night sky.

The telescope did not arrive at my school until April, by which time the night sky was becoming quite light.  So, although the telescope was assembled, it has sat in a corner of my classroom for the past 6 months.  Now that the dark evenings have returned, I felt it was time to try out the telescope.

I took it home for the October holidays and have been waiting for a rain-free day to set it up outside.  Today was the first day with suitable weather and I set the telescope up in my front garden to align the finder scope as best as I could.  If the sky remains clear, I am planning to go out with the telescope tonight to have a look at Jupiter and the other few objects whose name I know.

I used my mobile phone to record the setting up process.  The video below isn’t great quality but I think it manages conveys some of the steps involved in aligning the telescope.

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Physics teachers from across the Highlands got together for a CPD day last Saturday.  The event was hosted by Nick Forwood, our local Physics Teacher Network coordinator, at Fortrose Academy.

After a keynote from Tom Balanowski, the SQA Principal Assessor for Advanced Higher Physics, we were able to choose up to three workshops from the list on the right, plus an additional option of learning how to configure the free telescope for schools supplied by The Society for Popular Astronomy.

I presented a session on using blogs, wikis and iTunes in the Physics classroom.  It was a demonstration of the resources I have built into my classroom blog, with an update on how using iTunes to push homework exercises and videos homework solutions out to pupils’ home computers had been received.

I also took the chance to show off some of the work that had been produced during the Building Glow Communities event for Science teachers earlier in the week.  I was surprised to find that questions were asked about my use of Voicethread and Animoto in the classroom.  People who are working on developing their CfE outcomes were interested in the opportunities these tools presented in terms of genuine pupil-focused creativity, digital evidence of their experiences and the chance to produce something other than powerpoint slides.

I was delighted to share my experience of using these sites with them and gave examples of how I had used them in my classroom.  The enthusiasm with which they were considering non-traditional activities shows that Curriculum for Excellence really is going to change the way our pupils experience science in the years ahead.

The dust (sorry!) is starting to settle after 2 fantastic nights of participation in the annual Perseid meteor shower.  The event hasn’t actually finished just yet but the number of meteors per hour will fall rapidly now that we have passed peak activity.

So what was it all about?  I’m no astronomer, nor am I presumptuous enough to think I provide a decent explanation.  Basically, our planet just passed through the debris trail left by a comet called Swift-Tuttle.  You can find out more about the phenomenon here.  What I have found astonishing is the sheer number of non-astronomers (myself included) who have been following events and staying up late to view these blazing trails of light as they stream across the night sky.  How do I know that so many people have taken part? Well, that would be down to Twitter.

Many astronomers have seized the publicity available to them through the International Year of Astronomy 2009 to promote their work/research/hobby to people who have never had any dealing with astronomy before.  The 365 Days of Astronomy podcast dedicated an entire episode to the Perseids just before they arrived.  While these would have contributed to a raised awareness, they are not sufficiently mainstream to attract the unprecedented interest surrounding this year’s event – this is where Twitter comes in.

In the UK, a local astronomy group called Newbury Astronomical Society, who tweet from the @NewburyAS twitter account, seized the initiative by setting up the #meteorwatch hashtag for the Perseids event.  The tag caught on and hundreds of people shared their experiences during the shower by tweeting with that hashtag, taking it to 4th place in Twitter’s trending topics.  The organisation of the Newbury club even drew the attention of the BBC (click link on that page to see video footage) who visited “the bunker” during the first evening.

While the south of the UK enjoyed clear skies on the first evening, I was not so lucky.  As there was no way I could see the meteors, I tried to detect them using a very basic radio technique instead.  I connected an FM antenna to the back of an old Pioneer receiver unit and fed the output into a Griffin imic (with RCA to 3.5mm jack adapter) that was plugged into the usb port of a laptop.  The Griffin components were essential to convert the RCA HiFi electrical connections into a standard computer connection.

I tuned the radio to the lowest clear FM frequency available (87.5MHz) and used a virtual chart recorder package call Radio SkyPipe to record the data.  The recording software is quite straightforward and would be a good introduction to signals and measurement for senior pupils, such as those undertaking AH Physics investigations or the new Science Baccalaureate, as it requires several calibration & signal nulling steps before use.

Unfortunately I didn’t capture any exciting data although there was a curious low frequency amplitude modulation (see below) on the signal that I could not explain.

On the second night, I decided to leave the setting up of hardware for radio astronomy to the professionals and concentrated on looking for streamed data from the web.  I found this site broadcasting from Tavistock in Devon.  I downloaded the BS-Tuner application and pasted in the url of the broadcast site.  To my surprise I heard streaming FM static coming from the laptop.

Every now and then this static was pierced by an eerie scream as radio waves were reflected back down towards the Tavistock antenna by the ionised wake of each meteor.  The signals varied in volume, duration, clarity and complexity but due to their unpredictable nature it was difficult to record one.  However I have attached one of the sounds I captured and encourage you to play it using the flash player below.

I was disappointed to view just a single Perseid at around 2.30am last night, the weather just wasn’t right for it.  However, without those clouds I’d never have considered the potential for homemade radio astronomy.

A Nasa podcast on the Perseids is also available.

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I’ve clocked up quite a few miles lot in the past few weeks.  The trip to Perth for TeachMeet Physics (see earlier post), a day trip to Aberdeen to help write resources for science teachers to assist with the new optoelectronics CfE outcomes and then, after 2 days of Easter study school, I headed south for a check-up with my NHS dentist (one filling, btw) and let off some steam in Glasgow.

One thing I like about these long drives south (and back again) is the opportunity to fill my iPod with podcasts that I’ve just not had time to listen to during the typical school week.  With such patchy radio reception on the A9, it makes sense to have something else on standby for entertainment.  My “binge listening” habit has been commented on previously.

This last trip was accompanied by the 365 days of astronomy podcast, a project to celebrate 2009 as the International Year of Astronomy.  The individual podcast episodes are very easy to listen to, with a maximum length of 10 minutes per day.  Clearly, several weeks of podcasts are necessary for the 5 hour drive to Glasgow.  The topics discussed each day are diverse and I enjoyed learning Swedish astronomy nouns, hearing various speakers talking about our debt to Galileo, different views on Pluto’s reclassification as a dwarf planet and the answer to the question “What would happen if the moon didn’t exist?”

I’m currently looking at the astronomy outcome with my S2 class and one of the ideas they have put forward is the need for any colony to be sustainable.  It just so happens that one of the earlier podcasts in the 365 days talks about the space beer brewed from barley grown on the International Space Station.  So here we have an example of an arable crop being grown in space.  This is just the point my class were making – at some point you have to start growing your own crops if a space colony is going to survive.  The people behind the 365 days of astronomy podcast allow the audio to be reproduced, so here is the space beer episode.

January 9: The Link Between Beer and Space Settlement [ 10:06 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download