A reform of the content of university education is taking place in Russia today. A restoration of human directed principles, the denial of strict ideological components in education and an improvement in the teaching content of the humanities, are among the most important characteristics of the on-going reforms. An important part of today's activities is the introduction of the basics of natural sciences to the process of teaching humanities. We have gained four years experience in the establishment of natural sciences in humanities at the Ural State University (Ekaterinburg, Russia).

Here I present the methodological strategy of the basic general course of Natural History for humanities. The course is compulsory for undergraduate students of all the humanities (Depts. of Art, Philosophy, Sociology and Politology, Philology, History, Journalism and Economics). It begins from the first year and takes 3 semesters in the Dept. of Philosophy (60 hours of lectures and seminars) and 2 semesters in the other Depts. (40 hours of lectures and seminars). The course is united by a general idea — the History of the Earth. It is divided into three parts: (1) Cosmic period of the history of the Earth, (2) Matter and Energy (only for the Dept. of Philosophy), and (3) Geological and biological periods in the history of the Earth. The first (astronomical) part in turn consists of three chapters: (a) Scientific pictures of the world and their creators, (b) The real Universe (state of art geometry and physics of space), (c) “Genesis” (formation and evolution of the Universe, Sun and the Earth).

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.

Solar eclipses draw the attention of the general public to celestial events in the countries from which they are visible, and broad public education programs are necessary to promote safe observations. Most recently, a subcommittee of IAU Commission 46 composed of Julieta Fierro (from the National University of Mexico), the Canadian professor of optometry Ralph Chou (from the University of Waterloo) and me provided information about safe observations of the 24 October 1995 eclipse to people in Pakistan, India, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Guam. An important point is that there are advantages to seeing eclipses, including inspiration to students, and that people must always be given correct information. If scare techniques are used to warn people off eclipses, when it is later found out that the eclipse was not dangerous and, indeed, was spectacular, these students and other individuals will not trust warnings for truly hazardous activities like smoking, drugs, and behavior that puts one at risk for AIDS.

A total eclipse of the Sun is the most spectacular sight that can be seen, in my view, both from its physical and from its emotional impact, with the otherwise powerful Sun disappearing in the middle of the day. Though public interest in eclipses may be intense for only the immediate days preceding them, we can nonetheless take advantage of this interest to carry across important scientific ideas. The notion that the Universe is understandable and, in important ways, predictable, is a powerful idea that acts against the ideas of superstition and pseudoscience that are so rampant.

Introduction

When designing courses in astronomy – or any other science – there is a tendency to assume that the students whom we are addressing are younger versions of ourselves. As undergraduates we studied astronomy and now we are practicing it: it is natural to assume that the students we teach are destined to go on to become scientists themselves. But while this was a perfectly valid assumption in the past, it is valid no longer; and if we do not adjust our teaching methods accordingly, we do our students a grave disservice.

The sad truth is that most of them cannot possibly go on to become practicing scientists – because there are not enough jobs to accommodate them. We are all familiar with the terrible employment market nowadays: there is no need to belabor the point except to make the obvious observation that the situation is not going to get better in the foreseeable future. It is for Malthusian reasons that the job market for scientists is bad, and is going to stay bad on the average except for temporary fluctuations. If each astronomer guided, say, ten students on to PhDs in the course of his or her entire career, the population of astronomers would have multiplied tenfold over that time span – obviously an impossible situation over the long run.

The Humble Space Telescope project aims to launch a small space telescope for educational and recreational purposes, in time for the New Millennium.

The arrival of the 3rd Millennium, accompanied in the United Kingdom by a Millennium Commission distributing 250 million per year of National Lottery funds for good causes and imaginative projects which would otherwise require direct funding by the taxpayer, provides a unique opportunity to design, build and operate a small but capable version of the pioneering Hubble Space Telescope.

In July 1994, a leading British newspaper with a long history of covering developments in science, launched a competition for members of the public to propose science projects to be funded by the Millennium Commission. The idea of a small satellite telescope, fitted with a CCD detector package was submitted by Dr. Martin-Smith, and won a share of the top prize. Meanwhile, Rodney Buckland, a Trustee of the National Science Centre project, took up the idea as an ideal new field site for the Centre, and has become its Project Manager.

It is well established that specialised and initially-expensive technologies – for example Schmidt-Cassegrain optics, CCD cameras, computers and the Internet – began as the advanced tools of professionals, and in time become accessible to amateurs, educators, and the public, for learning and recreation.

Introduction

The UK is experiencing a relative Golden Age for planetaria, thanks in many ways to its national curriculum. In 1991 the British government finally bowed to many years of steady pressure by interest groups and introduced into a new and controversial general curriculum a requirement for pupils to attain knowledge about the Earth-Moon system, solar system objects and basic cosmology. Prior to this there had been no science curriculum for pupils aged under 11. Astronomy formed a small part of nature study. The science education of 11–16 year-olds depended on their GCSE syllabuses.

The purpose of this paper is to study what knowledge of the cosmos pupils are now required to attain, how the content changed when a revised curriculum was introduced in 1994, and how planetaria go about teaching the subject to schoolchildren. We will also look at how the curriculum differs in Scotland, and what ‘A’ level students have to learn about astronomy.

Background

From the late 1950s, when one of the first planetaria in Britain was built at Marylebone Road, London, up to 1991, some teachers had organised their school visits to these star theatres as an extra-curricula activity (except for those students studying astronomy at O-level) which required little or no preparation or class work afterwards. Generally speaking, however, most school parties turned up because they wanted to have a valuable learning experience about the Earth's place in the universe. Then, seemingly overnight, the government expected teachers to have detailed knowledge of the reasons for the seasons, tides, the Moon's phases, planetary motions, the Milky Way and many other difficult astronomical concepts.

What Is An Amateur Astronomer?

Let us begin by defining “amateur astronomer”. According to a dictionary, an amateur astronomer is “someone who loves astronomy, and cultivates it as a hobby”. At IAU colloquium 98 (The Contributions of Amateurs to Astronomy), Williams (1988) discussed this issue at length. He proposed that, to be an amateur astronomer, one must be an astronomer – able to do astronomy with some degree of skill; he then defined an amateur astronomer as “someone who carries out astronomy with a high degree of skill, but not for pay”.

Unfortunately, the word “amateur” has negative connotations to many people. This is partly because of the unfortunate choice of the word; “volunteer astronomers” might be a better choice. It is partly because there are indeed a few amateurs whose ideas and attitudes might be judged rather bizarre – but the same is true for some professionals. There might even be a hint of snobbery, especially in cultures in which qualifications (as opposed to ability) are paramount. Professionals certainly respect the contributions of the “superstars” of amateur astronomy: Prank Bateson, Robert Evans, Patrick Moore and the like. We tend to hold these people as examples, though very few amateurs are willing or able to contribute at this level. There are thousands of “rank-and-file amateurs” worldwide. They can and do contribute significantly to the advancement of astronomy.

I prefer to define amateur astronomer extremely broadly. In this case, their education, knowledge, skills at instrumentation, computing, observing, teaching and other astronomical activities could be anything from zero to PhD level in astronomy or a related field. Many amateur astronomers are professionals in other scientific or technical fields.

For decades, planetariums have been created to serve the cause of astronomical enlightenment – to offer people knowledge and understanding and a sense of place in a universe far bigger than themselves. It is an important role and one that we in planetariums continue to play – changing, we hope, as times, technology, educational philosophies, and our view of the universe change.

The first projection planetarium was demonstrated by the Zeiss Optical Company at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany in 1923. By 1970, the height of the Apollo moon program, there were an estimated 700 to 800 planetariums in the world, half of them less than six years old. Today, 26 years later, that number has more than doubled to a little over 2,000.

The world organization of the planetarium profession is the International Planetarium Society with over 600 members in more than 30 countries. Based on figures compiled in the 1995 IPS Directory, we find that slightly more than half of the world's planetariums are located in North America, with large numbers also in Asia and Europe, but relatively few in other parts of the world. If we consider distribution by country, we find that half are in the United States, more than 300 are in Japan, and Germany ranks third with nearly 100. Nineteen countries have ten or more planetariums.

Some 33 percent of the worlds’ planetariums are located in primary or secondary schools; 17 percent are at colleges and universities; 15 percent are part of museums and science centers; 7 percent are associated with observatories or other institutions.

Introduction

Distance education has a track record in astronomy and is already making a significant contribution worldwide. It will make an even greater contribution in the future, not only at-a-distance, but through greater use of self-study materials on- campus, where it will liberate staff for more appropriate forms of face-to-face teaching, and help overcome the need to do more and more with less and less resource. Distance education offers huge promise in meeting the educational needs of a burgeoning world population, and because low costs can be achieved there is no need for people in areas of material deprivation to face mental deprivation also. The IAU and The Open University can be proactive in promoting the spread of distance education, and of self-study on campus.

What is (successful) distance education?

Distance education is NOT as shown in Figure 1, though its distinctive feature is that the student is remote from the university or college! But in place of a megaphone a mixture of media is used in which printed texts usually carry the bulk of the educational material. There can also be audiovisual and computing media (including use of the Internet and of “multimedia”), and practical work. It is important to play to the strengths of the various media – a current pitfall is that multimedia can turn out to be little more than an expensive book.

The Present

There is no doubt that the science of astronomy is now in an exhilarating state. We are in the era of the 10 m optical telescope. Radio astronomy rivals optical astronomy in both positional precision and sensitivity. Observation from space has opened access to a wide range of frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum. The spectacular achievements of the Hubble Space Telescope underline the success story of space astronomy. At all wavelengths, detector technology has made striking advances in sensitivity and, coupled with cheap, sophisticated and powerful computers, raw data can be transformed into useful scientific data with breathtaking speed. One has only to add up the number of papers published in the three major astronomical journals to realise that one must read 100 journal pages a day (every day) to keep up with the literature in these three journals alone. Astronomy at the close of the 20th century is indeed exhilarating.

But there are indications that all is not well. Not unexpectedly the cost of new astronomical facilities is being called into question. Currently, no one nation can afford to finance a new telescope of the 10 m class and international consortia are now a commonplace to finance such facilities, e.g. the ESO 4 × 8 m telescopes in Chile. The great cost of science more generally, is now being seriously questioned, particularly in those areas of science which are fundamental, e.g. astronomy, particle physics, and which are not regarded as being currently relevant to industrial and commercial activity.

As the first speaker at this Colloquium, it is my pleasure to welcome the participants (and the readers of these Proceedings), on behalf of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) and its Commission 46 (Teaching of Astronomy). It is also my pleasure to thank our hosts University College London, and The Open University; the Scientific Organizing Committee, chaired by Lucienne Gouguenheim, and especially the Local Organizing Committee, chaired by Barrie Jones and Derek McNally. They have made this meeting most enjoyable and successful.

Eight years ago, many of us were in Williamstown, USA, for the first IAU Colloquium on astronomy education. Since then, there have been enormous changes – political, economic, and technological – which have affected our work. There have also been about 100 IAU conferences on research topics, but this is only the second on education. We all agree that we must work to correct that imbalance!

We are here to catch up on what has happened in astronomy education in the last eight years. We are here to teach and learn, through lectures, posters, and discussions – both formal and informal. We are here to renew old friendships, and make new ones. These human dimensions of this Colloquium are only hinted at in these Proceedings, but I assure you that they occurred.

Why is Astronomy Education Important?

Education is important to astronomers because it affects the recruitment and training of future astronomers, and because it affects the awareness, understanding and appreciation of astronomy by taxpayers and politicians who support us. We have an obligation to share the excitement and the significance of our work with students and the public.

A cultural role of astronomical education at all levels is well known and it is needless to repeat the corresponding arguments. Nobody denies it, but nobody can propose any universal way of introducing Astronomy on a level this branch of science deserves.

There is a good tradition to appreciate Astronomy in Russian schools. For more than a century part of the natural history science in school dedicated to the Universe has been considered as a separate part of the school curriculum in Russia. Before 1917 it was named Cosmography, and Astronomy thereafter. And up to now there is no decision or prescription to rule it out of the school program.

Nevertheless the teaching of Astronomy becomes less and less. Astronomy is taught only then and there where the enthusiasts of this subject are in existence. But the recent process of liberation of the educational system demands different approaches. Up to the present time several attempts to integrate astronomy with physics have not been very successful. The reason is the difference between their educational purposes.

The main purpose of this report is to emphasize the advantage of a somewhat more balanced program incorporating physics, astronomy and environment. Such a choice provides a more natural reason for integration, based on the ideal common to all three parts, to consider the world we live in as our home and property. The most general and fundamental ideas should be emphasized in such a course. As for astronomy, whose social importance is enormous in spite of the negligible teaching time, the necessary requirement is to elaborate a certain school minimum of astronomical knowledge.

The eccentricity is very small

Most textbooks of physics present the terrestrial orbit by a drawing which shows an ellipse of substantial eccentricity. This suggests a remarkable variation of the distance between Sun and Earth during the year up to a value of about 3:1 and more. Imagine the dramatic variation in size of the radiating area of the Sun seen by the terrestrial inhabitants with all the terrible consequences for temperature. All this is not true. There is no obvious change in size of the solar disc.

In nature the numerical eccentricity of the terrestrial orbit is only ∈ = e/a = 0.01675 (a = major or long axis, b = minor or short axis, e = focal length). This value is so small, that this ellipse cannot be distinguished from a circular orbit in a drawing when using a normal pen (a/b = 1.00014). The deviation would be 1/20 of the width across the line of the pencil. By what procedure would it be possible to measure this small eccentricity using only simple means in the classroom?

Observe the varying size of the solar disc

A first approach could be the idea to take photographs of the Sun throughout the whole year. The angular width of the solar disc varies by about 3% within this period. The focal length f = 50 mm of a normal camera produces an image of the Sun, which is 0.4 mm in diameter on the film. Trying to determine the eccentricity from these pictures better than 10% would mean ability to measure difference of 1μm in size on the film.

Introduction

Sydney Observatory is a museum of astronomy and a public observatory. It is Australia's oldest existing observatory and is now a branch of the Powerhouse Museum, the largest museum in the southern hemisphere. With 65,000 visitors each year, the observatory is popular with the public. Visitors can come during the day to see exhibits and audiovisuals and in the evenings on telescope viewing sessions. They can also take part in school holiday workshops, adult education courses or a telescope-making course. In addition, many school groups come along during the school terms to extend the astronomical knowledge of their students. Other professional services provided by the observatory include an annual guidebook with up-to-date information for the sky as seen from Sydney and an astronomical information service for the public and the media.

In this paper we will mainly discuss selected aspects of our educational activities, exhibitions and equipment, highlighting recent developments in the 1990s.

Recent Innovations in Education

Open Nights

A maximum of only 45 people can be accommodated at any one time in one of our regular evening sessions. During school holidays this is nowhere near enough to meet the demand. When there is a major astronomical event, we like to give more people a chance to look through our telescopes. At these times we organise open nights at which up to 1 000 people can attend.

Special open nights have been held to view lunar eclipses, a favourable opposition of Mars and the ring plane passage of Saturn. During the collision of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter we held six open nights, each attracting over 1 000 people.