It’s been a few weeks since I’ve posted anything but it’s not because I haven’t been busy on astronomy. My recent activity just hasn’t been in the Almagest or observing. Rather, I’ve been working on some classes.
First off, I’ve been invited to teach a class for the Canton of Hrothgeirsfjordr1 on February 16. Since I haven’t taught any classes in that region yet, we agreed on my overarching history of astronomy class. However, I haven’t taught it in a few years and in that time, I’ve learned a lot of new material. As such, that class has gotten a major overhaul. And since we’ll be teaching it digitally, I’ve added a PowerPoint presentation to go along with it.
I’ll post details as I have them.
Next, my intent is to have a series of sequential classes that build to be able to teach all the concepts and math necessary to actually start working on the Almagest. My Motion of the Heavens class was the first of these and I’d intended for a class on the Mathematics of the Almagest to be next, but as I was working up an outline for that class, I realized that there was just too much time spent explaining the celestial sphere. As such, I’ve decided it would be best to break that into a separate class as well.
This class took a lot of time to prepare because I spent an entire weekend just doing a large set of drawings to help visualize what I was wanting to cover. Unlike the sketches I often do for the Almagest posts2, I wanted these ones to be much cleaner, showing the constellations to give a much better frame of reference.
Ultimately, I’m quite happy with the results and am looking forward to presenting this which I’ll be doing for my home Barony of Three Rivers the following night, on February 17. Again, I’ll post details when they’re available.
Lastly, as we start looking to the bright days ahead where we can gather again in person, I’d promised my friend Mistress Rochwen that I would teach a class on celestial navigation this year at Lilies War, the goal being to have a practicum on the Fyrdraka3. To help me decide what should be included, I recently picked up Sailing School, the first few chapters of which gave me enough information to get an idea of what needs to be included. The outline for that class is in progress although we don’t know when Lilies will be this year. There’s talk of late summer or early fall so here’s hoping.
Hopefully in the next week or two I can get back to the Almagest.
