Computer as a Tool in Astronomy Teaching

Summary

As yet, astronomy, the most ancient of all sciences, surprisingly is not included in French secondary science classes. Recent trends in favour of a more attractive and motivating scientific education have taken it up.

Astronomy has, at all times, been arising curiosity, and now provides a privileged field to scientific approach :

• Observation of the vault of heaven and its peculiarities

• Description of its general appearance and of the specific movement of stars and Planets

• Measurement of distances, coordinates and angles.

• This will make it possible to define successive models, which will be ever closer to the observed reality.

The obstacle of mathematics must be avoided or bypassed : many devices and demonstration models allow for a simplified and convincing approach. Computers may be valuable tools. My purpose is not to go through the multimedia version of an encyclopaedia but to follow some new trails.

DIGITAL IMAGES are efficient tools for first experiences : observation can be adapted to a specific public and digital images can guide pupils through observation. They facilitate measuring operations : interaction will incite users to creativity and discovery, and numerical models will be exploited much more easily.

The movement of planets is a quite convincing example. I use for that purpose a series of digital images of the sky : each photograph represents the constellation of Taurus, all taken during the 1990–1991 winter. My software allows pupils to recognize the characteristic stars of that region and to locate the moving planet Mars among them.