3°) Educational proposals

The transit of Venus in 2004 will inspire yet another “first”: the participation of the general public in gathering scientific measurements. Indeed, a transit has the notable advantage of being easy to observe and photograph, using cheap and simple easy-to-use instruments. What’s more, this next transit will be fully visible in our part of the world, contrary to the transit expected in 2012. (I am assuming, of course, that nobody will have the “patience” needed to wait for the following one in 2117!)

As neither the transit of Venus, nor astronomical measures of lengths in the solar system, appear in French or English school curricula, the proposals set out here are aimed at astronomy clubs and cross-curricular projects.

On June 8, 2004, the transit of Venus will be an opportunity of cheering up the end of the school year, maybe providing an excellent excuse for taking the pupils to visit an observatory. (Note that volunteers will be numerous!) Even better: it could be the pretext to create an astronomy club for carrying out a projection of the event in the playground. This could be done using a telescope, but a ready-made, cheap and much safer device, such as the ‘solarscope’, can be purchased (see www.solarscope.org). The solarscope is an instrument capable of giving an image of about 12 cm without any adjustment. This permits the observation not just of the transit, but also sunspots, and is virtually risk-free, even for young children.

However, the most interesting activity would be the calculating the Earth-Sun distance on the basis of pupils’ observations, and then comparing their results with known data. A successful outcome may trigger off pupils’ enthusiasm for other scientific and historical subjects.