Just before the glorious day of poultry, a paper was published where I am the first author.

Check it out here

It’s called “Using Smartphone Camera Technology to Explore Stellar Parallax: Method, Results, and Reactions”. Which is official-ese for getting high school students to use their Android or iOS phones to play around with the method behind stellar parallax. Stellar parallax,… in a very short explanation …, is measuring how far a star is away from us by looking at how the star ‘wobbles’ in the sky over the year…. the closer the star, the bigger the wobble. Its fundamentally how we know the distance to anything outside of our solar system, and it is how we define the distance unit in astronomy, the parsec. So its pretty essential stuff to learn about astronomy. BUT the way it is usually taught in high school is by giving the students a very abstract definition…. which really only makes complete sense after you understand the definition… so this method of instruction is really just a illusory pile of circular uselessness. You can, however, use some type of camera…. a smartphone with large screen is a tool that seems custom-made for this…. to run through the method in a classroom on the small scale before trying to explain to the students what the definition means on the astronomical scale. The image above is from my early test run where I had a fake star blu-taced to a stapler and took images with my iPhone as it ‘orbitted’ around the fake sun. Its been used in quite a number of classes now to great effect… once the apprentices have some noisy wobbly fun with their cameras then they are in the perfect spot to actually understand the abstract definition… which is no longer abstract but can be directly linked to what they just did with their phones. The next step for the students is to actually do this for real with a real star using real data with real software astronomers use. I have finished the design for running this in class and this will be tried and tested in first term 2012 where they look at a star, Proxima Centauri, for which I have been collected data from for nearly two years from the LCOGT.net telescopes. Watch this space!