Two guest speakers for the fall Astronomy Education Workshop on Saturday, October 6th have been confirmed. Brian Thomas, an astrobiophysicist from Washburn University will be here to talk about dangers to life on Earth from space. His research specifically looks at how radiation events like supernovae and gamma-ray bursts will affect ocean Phytoplankton. Jeff Wilkerson from Luther College has extensive experience supervising undergraduate students on projects with small telescopes making photometric observations. Jeff will summarize his extensive program including a current major interest (development of rapid photometric techniques for the study of stellar signal variations) and describe how undergraduates benefit from these types of experiences.

Substantial updates have occurred to the Coordinates and Motions and Binary and Variable Star modules.

In the coordinates and motions module this involved the addition of a handful of new questions, grouping questions of a similar topic near each other, and the addition of the daylight simulator (screenshot below). This simulator shows the illumination on Earth as seen from the sun in either a yearly or daily format. We had several questions which involved the yearly format – constructing an animation using the pattern of sunlight every day at noon from a given longitude (usually the prime meridian). We found that students really needed to see the daily format before they could begin to reason with the yearly format.

A number of new questions have been added to the variable and binary star module. Previously most of the questions had focused on concepts related to photometric observations of variable stars. The new questions focus much more strongly on concepts taught in the lecture hall such as center of mass, locations and motions of the stars in a binary system, and light curves.

A press release on the AAPT's 2012 Halliday and Resnick Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award can be found here.

The 15th Astronomy Education Workshop will be held on Saturday, October 6th. This date was selected by avoiding NATS (September 27-29), UNL Fall Break (October 15-16), WoPhy (October 18-20), N-AAPT Fall Meeting (November 3), and all home football games. Please check back for further details -- programming information will be posted as it is determined.

Check out our new series of Astronomy Demonstration Videos entitled AU available under the Resources tab here. The videos are 2 to 3 minutes long and consist of a demonstration commonly appropriate for the introductory astronomy classroom prefaced with enough explanation to provide the proper context. We created these videos with distance education courses in mind where typical students go the entire semester without seeing a demonstration, but they are also useful for instructors with limited equipment or limited time to set equipment up. The videos can be run online or downloaded to a local computer. They are freely available for any non-profit educational use.