The set of activities is free to download (from ) and will hopefully provide astronomy educators with a practical and useful teaching resource. Overall, students can closely follow the ingenious methods devised by those sky observers of the past thus obtaining an understanding of the contribution of both western and non-western cultures to the development of science. The use of planetarium software has the advantage of including a visual aspect in the learning procedure thus offering greater realism.

Adding a component of the history of science to the teaching of astronomy enhances student interest and helps to counter misconceptions and prejudices. With the aid of the Stellarium software, activity instructions have been designed that enable the user to simulate some of these awe-inspiring scientific achievements. These include for example, estimating the distance to the Moon using a solar eclipse, the size of the Earth by observing the altitude of a star and using lunar eclipses for finding the direction to Mecca.

More from Medium Unbecoming 10 Seconds That Ended My 20 Year Marriage Mark Schaefer. Although lacking important observational technology such as the telescope, those pioneers performed naked eye measurements and implemented simple but ingenious astronomical calculations. Assistant Planetarium Producer and Digital Content Researcher at We the Curious. The activities are inspired by observations made by the ancient Greeks, Babylonians, Indians and also the medieval Islamic and Chinese astronomers, whose contribution to the development of astronomy was immense. The development of an online platform is presented that incorporates a set of student activities based on the freeware Stellarium planetarium software.

Planetarium software stellarium