Campagne d'astronomie

The Camp d'été d'astronomie is a yearly week-long event to practice and experiment with astronomy. Since 2017, I have been teaching a class of adults who had already practiced astronomy and wanted to learn more. The program I taught was centered on experimental projects such as measuring the mass of Jupiter, the distance to Mars, or the composition of a star.

2020

Participants learned about
  • How to align telescope optics
  • How to clean a telescope mirror
  • How to use Stellarium
  • How to polar align an equatorial mount
  • How to safely observe the Sun
  • Kepler's third law
  • Celestial mechanics

2019

The participants did five "labs" over the course of the week: The participants also learned about:

2018

The abriged schedule is here. Three experimental projects were implemented by groups of three or four people :
  • Measuring the distance to Mars
  • Sorting stars based on their composition
  • Drawing the objects in the sky with pencil and paper
The slides I made to present the projects are here.

2017

Participants practiced using telescopes and learned about
  • Galaxies and the Hubble tuning fork
  • Stellar evolution
  • Celestial coordinates