Vandewiere, Judith ; De Cock, Mieke ; Sermeus, Jan

Talk presented at 6th Shaw-IAU Workshop on Astronomy for Education on 2024-11-12

Abstract: Explaining the apparent motion of the Sun and stars is challenging for students. To help students reason about it and support them in switching between different perspectives, educators use various representations of the celestial sphere (e.g., the planetarium or a celestial globe). However, we suspect that students (and perhaps educators) may not fully grasp the underlying model of the (representations of the) celestial sphere, as well as its possibilities and limitations. This lack of understanding can lead to misinterpretations or overgeneralizations. As a first step in studying students’ understanding of the celestial sphere, we constructed a framework to categorize different representations of the celestial sphere model according to the perspectives and reference frames they use.