1301.2119 (Todd Timberlake)

Modeling the History of Astronomy: Ptolemy, Copernicus and Tycho    [PDF]

Todd Timberlake

This paper describes a series of activities in which students investigate and use the models of planetary motion introduced by the Hellenistic astronomer Claudius Ptolemy in the 2nd Century, by the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus in the mid-16th Century, and by the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe in the late16th Century. The activities involve the use of open source software to help students discover important observational facts, learn the necessary vocabulary, understand the fundamental properties of different theoretical models, and relate the theoretical models to observational data. Once they understand the observations and models, students complete a series of projects in which they observe and model a fictitious solar system with four planets orbiting in circles around a central star.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.2119