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You are here: Home > 2022 > January > 08

Archives for 8 January 2022

๐Ÿ–‹ โ›ธ WONDERFUL WORDS: A Winter Poem for Homeschool Dads

8 January 2022 by Bob O'Hara

Here’s a wintertime poem-of-the-week to tug at your heartstrings: “Ice” by contemporary American poet Gail Mazur (b.ย 1937), for all homeschool fathers.

Ice

In the warming house, children lace their skates,
bending, choked, over their thick jackets.

A Franklin stove keeps the place so cozy
itโ€™s hard to imagine why anyone would leave,

clumping across the frozen beach to the river.
December’s always the same at Ware’s Cove,

the first sheer ice, black, then white
and deep until the city sends trucks of men

with wooden barriers to put up the boys’
hockey rink. An hour of skating after school,

of trying wobbly figure-8’s, an hour
of distances moved backwards without falling,

then โ€” twilight, the warming house steamy
with girls pulling on boots, their chafed legs

aching. Outside, the hockey players keep
playing, slamming the round black puck

until it’s dark, until supper. At night,
a shy girl comes to the cove with her father.

Although there isn’t music, they glide
arm in arm onto the blurred surface together,

braced like dancers. She thinks she’ll never
be so happy, for who else will find her graceful,

find her perfect, skate with her
in circles outside the emptied rink forever?

Most of our weekly poems are intended as examples for homeschool study, but aย few are just for mom and dad to enjoy. Here’s hoping you and your family are enjoying the special warmth that winter brings.

What wonderful words and poetical productions have you been studying in your homeschool this Orion Term?ย ๐Ÿ˜Š

โกโ€…Literary lives: The website of the Poetry Foundation includes biographical notes and examples of the work of many important poets (including Gail Mazur) that are suitable for high school students and homeschool teachers.ย ๐Ÿ–‹

โกโ€…Here, said the year: This post is one of our regular homeschool poems-of-the-week. Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar to follow along with us as we visit fifty of our favorite friends over the course of the year, and add your name to our River Houses mailing list to get posts like these delivered right to your mailbox every week.ย ๐Ÿ—ž

Filed Under: Homeschool Language & Literature, Poems-of-the-Week

๐ŸŒŸ STAR BRIGHT: Capella for January

8 January 2022 by Bob O'Hara

January is the middle month of Orion Term in the River Houses, and as our monthly star calendar will tell you, January’s Great Star is Capella, the brightest star in the constellation Auriga the Charioteer. Its formal designation is ฮฑย Aurigaeย โ€” “alpha of Auriga.” Auriga and Capella are high in the northeast in the early evening this month, about half way between Orion and the Pole Star, and they pass overhead toward the west as the night goes on.

The constellation Auriga the Charioteer and its alpha star, Capella. The diagonal blue line represents the plane of the Milky Way, and the lower curved blue line represents the plane of the ecliptic. (Image:ย Wikimediaย Commons.)

If you want to introduce your students to Capella and Auriga you can start with some basic astronomy and astronomical mythology from your backyard star guide:

Auriga is an elegant constellation in the heart of the Milky Way. It is easily identified by its alpha star, Capella, which is the seventh brightest star in the sky [at magnitude 0.1]. Auriga is an ancient constellation, one of Ptolemy’s original 48. Epsilon Aurigae (ฮต), the star just southwest of Capella, is an eclipsing binary, veiled every 27 years by an unknown companion. The next eclipse will begin in 2036.

There are a few stories associated with this constellation. The star Capella represents a mother goat that the charioteer carries on his back along with her three kids (the neighboring stars). Another story has it that the chariot and rider may represent Hephaestus, the crippled blacksmith god who built the vehicle to move about more easily. (Backyard Guide to the Night Sky, page 251)

That’s plenty for beginning studentsย โ€” your little lesson is done. If you want to get more advanced, the Wikipedia page on Capella is packed with additional information on everything from astrometry to cultural history.

Relative sizes of the four main stars in the Capella system: yellow giants Capella Aa and Capella Ab, and red dwarfs Capella H and Capella L, with our sun (Sol) for comparison. Note that this diagram is meant to show only the sizes of the respective stars, not their relative positions. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

The apparently single star we see as Capella is actually a quadruple star system made up of two yellow giants designated Capella Aa and Capella Ab, both much larger than our sun, and two red dwarf stars designated Capella H and Capella L, all orbiting one another. The two yellow giants are too close to each other to be distinguished with a telescope โ€” they are separated by about the same distance as our sun and Venus โ€” but the existence of the pair was established in the 1890s through study of Capella’s regularly changing spectrum month by month. The existence of the second red-dwarf pair within the Capella system, orbiting the two yellow giants at a much greater distance, was confirmed in 1936.

The constellation Auriga the Charioteer, carrying Capella (“the little goat”), in an imaginative illustration from Urania’s Mirror (1824). (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

Capella is quite close to us in astronomical terms: only 43 light-years away. When we look at Capella today, we’re actually seeing light that was emitted from the system 43 years ago. The age of the Capella system is estimated to be 500โ€“600 million yearsย โ€” much younger than our sun, which is aย very old 4.6 billion.

Sometime frosty evening this month, take your homeschool students out at dusk and introduce them to this great system of suns, and teach them its name, and so give them a new friend for life.

What astronomical observations and stellar sightings have you been making in your homeschool this Orion Term?ย ๐Ÿ˜Š

โกโ€…Alpha and beta and gamma, oh my: Most of the principal stars within each constellation have both old vernacular namesย โ€” Vega, Sirius, Arcturus, and so onย โ€” as well as more formal scientific designations. The German astronomer Johann Bayer (1572โ€“1625) devised the formal system of star designations that is still in common use today. In Bayer’s system, the stars in each constellation, from brightest to dimmest, are assigned a lowercase letter of the Greek alphabet: ฮฑโ€…(alpha, brightest), ฮฒโ€…(beta, second brightest), ฮณโ€…(gamma, third brightest), ฮดโ€…(delta, fourth brightest), and so on. This letter designation is combined with the name of the constellation in its Latin possessive (genitive) form: Lyra becomes Lyrae (“of Lyra”), Canis Major becomes Canis Majoris (“of Canis Major”), and so on. The brightest star in the constellation Lyra (the star Vega) thus becomes ฮฑโ€…Lyrae (“alpha of Lyra”), the brightest star in Canis Major (the star Sirius) becomes ฮฑโ€…Canis Majoris (“alpha of Canis Major”), and so on, through all 24 Greek letters and all 88 constellations. How bright would you expect, say, the ฯƒโ€…(sigma) star of Orion to be? Not very bright โ€” it’s far down the alphabet โ€” but ฯƒโ€…Orionis happens to mark the top of Orion’s sword, so even though it’s not very bright it’s still notable and easy to locate on a dark night.ย โœจ

โกโ€…Star bright: The brightness of a star as we see it in our night sky is its magnitude โ€” or more properly, its apparent magnitude. The scale of star magnitudes was developed long before modern measuring instruments were invented, so it can be a little bit confusing for beginners. Originally, the brightest stars in the sky were called “first magnitude” and the less-bright stars “second magnitude,” “third magnitude,” and so on, down to the dimmest stars visible to the naked eye, which were called “sixth magnitude.” In the nineteenth century the star Vega (our August star) was chosen as the standard brightness reference and its value on the magnitude scale was defined to be zero (0.0). Five steps in magnitude (from 0.0 to 5.0 or from 1.0 to 6.0) was defined to be a change in brightness of 100 times: a star 100 times dimmer than Vega (0.0) was defined to be a magnitude 5.0 star. Vega is not quite the brightest star is the sky, however, so the scale also had to be extended into negative numbers: Sirius (our March star), for example, is magnitude โ€“1.5, about three times brighter than Vega (at 0.0). The planet Venus at its brightest is about magnitude โ€“4.2; the full moon is about magnitude โ€“12.9; the sun is magnitude โ€“26.7. By contrast, the dimmest stars visible to the naked eye in a populated, light-polluted area are about magnitude 3.0; the dimmest stars visible under very dark conditions are about magnitude 6.5. The Hubble Space Telescope in orbit around the earth has photographed distant stars and galaxies below magnitude 30, the dimmest celestial objects humans have seen so far.ย ๐ŸŒƒ

โกโ€…And all dishevelled wandering stars: How far away are the stars? Do they all occupy a single celestial “dome” that rotates through the heavens (as some ancient and medieval astronomers believed), or are they scattered through space at different individual distances? Astronomers had long suspected that the “fixed” stars existed at different distances from us, but early attempts to measure those distances failed. It was not until the early 1800s that instruments and measuring techniques became precise enough to allow the first stellar distances to be calculated using the technique of parallax. Parallax is the displacement in the apparent position of an object with respect to the background when an observer moves from side to side. It’s an ordinary phenomenon you experience every dayย โ€” it’s how we judge distances as we move through the landscape. Stellar parallaxes are extremely smallย โ€” fractions of an arc-second (one 3600th of a degree)ย โ€” and they are calculated by measuring a star’s position against the background at opposite sides of the earth’s orbit, six months apart. (That’s the astronomical equivalent of taking one step to the side.) Vega, our August star, was one of the first stars to have its parallax measured; modern estimates put it at about 0.13 arc-seconds. Apply some trigonometry, and that yields a distance of about 25 light-years.ย ๐Ÿ”ญ

โกโ€…Watchers of the skies: Teaching your students to recognize the constellations is one of the simplest and most enduring gifts you can give them. We recommend the handy Backyard Guide to the Night Sky as a general family referenceย โ€” it will help you identify all the northern hemisphere constellations and will point out many highlights, including the names and characteristics of the brightest stars. Your recommended world atlas also has beautiful maps of the whole northern and southern hemisphere night skies on plates 121โ€“122 (10th and 11th eds.). Why not find a dark-sky spot near you this month and spend some quality homeschool time beneath the starry vault.ย ๐ŸŒŒ

โกโ€…First star I see tonight: This is one of our regular Homeschool Astronomy posts featuring twelve of the most notable stars of the northern hemisphere night sky. Download and print your own copy of our River Houses Star Calendar and follow along with us as we visit a different Great Star each monthย โ€” and make each one of them a homeschool friend for life.ย ๐ŸŒŸ

Filed Under: Homeschool Astronomy, Monthly Great Stars

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