A lot of people have been talking about recent observations of the star Betelgeuse this week. Here’s one great thread I happened to see:
After seeing this thread I thought it would be fun to share some of the ideas about the recent observations of Betelgeuse with the boys. Although I’m way out of my league here, there were some great resources I found that I thought would help the boys understand what was going on. Two of those resources were:
A discussion on Astroblog about Betelgeuse
The Light Curve Generator from the American Association of Variable Star Observers
I started today’s project by showing the boys the article on Astroblog and then the graph in Eric Mamajek’s tweet:
Next we looked at a graph from the Light Curve generator showing how the brightness of Betelgeuse has varied going back about 6 months. Sorry for the glare on the computer screen 😦
The boys had different ideas about how to interpret the data – which was fun to hear:
Next I had each on my son’s create a new graph. My younger son went first and he wanted to look at the observations from a single astronomer. We did this by using the green dots since there were only to people who collected that data. The astronomer whose data we looked at was Wolfgang Volmann:
My older son went second – he wanted to look at the observations of Betelgeuse going back a long time. We were able to zoom in on a time period in the 70s and 80s in which many observations showed that Betelgeuse was pretty dim.
This was a really fun project to work through with the kids. It really highlights the difficulty of collecting data in astronomy, and in the real world in general! It was fun to hear their ideas about how to think through the
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