Astrophotography has been responsible for the discovery of planets, solar systems, stars, and several other celestial objects, which directly helps with expanding our knowledge about the universe and creating scientific models for nature. Practical techniques have been extensively described, including Covington, who has published an extensive…

From ancient times, the different features of planets and moons have created a huge interest. Aristarchus was one of the first to study the relative relations among Earth, Moon, and Sun. This interest has remained until today, and therefore it is always relevant to make this knowledge more appealing to the younger generations. Nowadays, smartphone…

In this paper, we present a physical modeling activity whose objective is to allow students to determine the differences between a disk and a sphere using pure scientific criteria. Thereunto, we reproduce the Sun-Earth-Moon system with low-cost materials and compare the illumination effects on the Moon considering two possible shapes for it (a…

The planets in our solar system are remarkable and captivating objects for beginning astronomers to study. While merely observing the planets is fairly easy, it can be difficult to capture the high-quality images beginners hope for. The methods used for deep-sky astrophotography are optimized for dim, fairly large objects using large apertures and…

Stellar parallax is a concept that is dealt with infrequently in the high school classroom other than by qualitative consideration of stereoscopic parallax and argument by analogy. Use of stellar parallax for distance determination can be difficult for students to understand without some type of hands-on experience to explore the concept. Thus,…