Resources
Below, I have links to sites and a lesson plan on charting sunspots with real SOHO data.
Showing posts with label sunspots. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sunspots. Show all posts
Thursday, August 2, 2012
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
Yale-Peabody Astronomy--Day 2, Part 1: Sunspots
My head is spinning! We learned so much today...lectures on gravity, the Sun, meteorites and meteors! Okay, one topic at a time: Sunspots.
Today, we got a chance to practice using a Sunspotter telescope. An ingenious tool to safely view sunspots on the surface of the sun. The Peabody Museum has purchased a supply of these tools and as part of the Fellowship, we can borrow them for about 1 month to do sunspot investigations with our students. You can purchase one here. Charting sunspot locations over a period of time can be used to show that the Sun rotates, and can be used to discover the direction of rotation of the Sun. One interesting thing that I noticed, was that the Sun moved out of the field of view unbelievably quickly! Every couple of minutes, the Earth would rotate enough so that the image of the Sun was completely off of the viewing platform.
I was quite surprised by this, and Dr. Michael Faison, astronomy professor and Director of the Leitner Observatory and Planetarium at Yale confirmed that the Sun's apparent motion is one solar diameter approximately every 2 minutes! Fascinating!
Right here, you can see today's image of the Sun from Spaceweather.com. In the image, you can see many sunspots. When we were using the Sunspotter, we could see 4 of the largest of them.
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| This is the sunspotter tool that we used today. |
Today, we got a chance to practice using a Sunspotter telescope. An ingenious tool to safely view sunspots on the surface of the sun. The Peabody Museum has purchased a supply of these tools and as part of the Fellowship, we can borrow them for about 1 month to do sunspot investigations with our students. You can purchase one here. Charting sunspot locations over a period of time can be used to show that the Sun rotates, and can be used to discover the direction of rotation of the Sun. One interesting thing that I noticed, was that the Sun moved out of the field of view unbelievably quickly! Every couple of minutes, the Earth would rotate enough so that the image of the Sun was completely off of the viewing platform.
I was quite surprised by this, and Dr. Michael Faison, astronomy professor and Director of the Leitner Observatory and Planetarium at Yale confirmed that the Sun's apparent motion is one solar diameter approximately every 2 minutes! Fascinating!
Right here, you can see today's image of the Sun from Spaceweather.com. In the image, you can see many sunspots. When we were using the Sunspotter, we could see 4 of the largest of them.
 |
| A visible light image of the sunspots from Spaceweather.com |
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
Win! Yale-Peabody Summer Astronomy Fellowship!
EPIC WIN!
I get to spend three days with the telescopes and planetarium at the Yale University Leitner Observatory. "Excited" doesn't even come close to describing how I feel about this.
It also comes with some perks: free money, plus a membership to the Yale-Peabody Museum (the original dinosaurs, people) multiple field trips with bus costs, planetarium shows and museum admission covered for all of my classes. But that's, like, not even the best part.
TELESCOPES. Have you seen their telescopes? Yes! I am especially interested in learning how to build a scope/viewer that will let me and my students observe sunspots (and future eclipses). I have no idea if they will teach me how to do it, but I'm going to ask.
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