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Michael Edmiston wrote:
Each student therefore gets a miniature earth suspended within a clear
Did I ever tell you about the time I went stargazing in
a meadow near Aspen with a friend of mine who's a professor
at MIT? He got out his charts and started getting his
telescope all set up and aligned so that he could use
the setting-circles to find the goodies we wanted to find.
He was about 1/4th of the way through the alignnment
process when he realized that I had just plunked my
telescope onto its tripod and manhandled it until
it was pointing in the right direction. I had no idea
what was the Right Ascension or Declination of what I
wanted to look at, but I knew where it was on the sky.
My buddy was taken aback. He was using what he thought
was the "scientific" approach, using a telescope that
cost about twice what mine did, and (because if its
smaller size) should have been easier to handle -- but I
was getting results faster, because I knew where stuff
was on the sky. On what I call the celestial sphere, and
what my dictionaries call the celestial sphere. I don't
need coordinates to know where stuff is.
A related question: Ask your students what happens if
the geospin axis precesses. Do they think the "celestial
sphere" will follow the earth's axis, taking the fixed
stars with it? If they do think that, you may conclude
that the model is allowing (maybe even causing) some
serious misconceptions.
This posting is the position of the writer, not that of Blondlot,
Lysenko, or Schon.
This posting is the position of the writer, not that of SUNY-BSC, NAU or the AAPT.