Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Oct 2010
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010aipc.1283..124a&link_type=abstract
MATHEMATICS AND ASTRONOMY: A JOINT LONG JOURNEY: Proceedings of the International Conference. AIP Conference Proceedings, Volum
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Astronomy, Astronomical Observatories, Solar Origin, Astronomical Catalogs, Atlases, Sky Surveys, Databases, Retrieval Systems, Archives, Etc., Observatories And Site Testing, Solar Activity
Scientific paper
I have introduced a general education course called Heavenly Mathematics and Cultural Astronomy [2] at the National University of Singapore. The goal of this course is to study astronomy in a cultural context with a tropical emphasis. Most astronomy books are written from a high northern latitude point of view, but Singapore is almost on the equator, so I aim to be ``hemispherically-correct''. Singapore is also a multi-racial society, where public holidays are determined using the Gregorian, Chinese, Islamic and Indian calendars.
The course starts with an introduction to observational astronomy with an emphasis on the appearance of the Sun and the Moon from different parts of the world. I then give a fairly detailed description of the Gregorian, Chinese, Islamic and Indian calendars [1, 4, 5], and finish with a thorough discussion of the analemma, equation of time and navigation [3].
Being a mathematician, my approach is quite mathematical, but my emphasis is on geometrical reasoning. Formulas and computations may scare some students away, but they are surprisingly willing to struggle with complicated spatial visualization.
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