In November 2019, a series of public lectures organized by the Accademia Nazionale Virgiliana and the Mantua chapter of AIF (Associazione per l’Insegnamento della Fisica) to celebrate the anniversary of the famous Dyson’s announcement prompted us to gather all the data taken by astronomers during the years.
A careful bibliographic research led us to collect different sets of measurements, but we had not been able to find a single dataset containing all the values. Hence, we transcribed all the measurements from the original papers, we harmonized the values and we created a single dataset of homogeneous observations. Finally, we decided to release it publicly, believing it could be useful for teachers.
Together with the whole dataset, in [1] we provide a blueprint for a possible group activity for students, useful to introduce the theory in physics classes with a playful approach.
The dataset is provided in CSV format, so that is can be easily imported by most of spreadsheet programs, data analysis tools, and programming languages. The file can be found within the root of this repository as a file named eclipses_*YYYYmmddHHMMSS*.csv, where *YYYYmmddHHMMSS* is the time stamp of the last edit to the database.
More details on the structure of the dataset, the historical expeditions considered in out analisys, and the suggested educational activity can be found in our article [1] - feel free to use the dataset and cite our work.
Emanuele Goldoni and Ledo Stefanini
[1] Emanuele Goldoni and Ledo Stefanini 2020 Phys. Educ. 55 045009. https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6552/ab8778
@article{Goldoni_2020,
doi = {10.1088/1361-6552/ab8778},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1088%2F1361-6552%2Fab8778},
year = 2020,
month = {may},
publisher = {{IOP} Publishing},
volume = {55},
number = {4},
pages = {045009},
author = {Emanuele Goldoni and Ledo Stefanini},
title = {A century of light-bending measurements: bringing solar eclipses into the classroom},
journal = {Physics Education}
}