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Mercury, July/August 1995 Table of Contents

by Vladimir Stefl, Masaryk University

(c) 1995 Astronomical Society of the Pacific

Six years after the Velvet Revolution, Czech astronomers interact freely with their colleagues abroad, while keeping up their centuries-old commitment to education. Their universities, however, are running out of money.

The Czech Republic has been a place of education for important personalities in astronomy, such as Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, Christian Doppler and Albert Einstein. Today, the country's educational system is in a state of considerable modification. New private schools are supplementing the public schools, while elementary and secondary schools have adjusted their programs, mildly reducing the role of astronomy.

The teaching of astronomy begins in the fourth-grade of elementary school as part of the introductory natural- science course, when teachers discuss the solar system and gravity. In the sixth-grade, the geography course incorporates other elements of astronomy, such as the seasons and the duration of day and night. Astronomy is a major component of eighth-grade physics, and during the section on optics, teachers introduce eclipses and the velocity of light.

In secondary school, which is not compulsory in the Czech Republic, freshman physics integrates astronomy, including Kepler's laws. Senior-year astrophysics has three sections: "Radiation," which includes the distances, mass, spectra, and fundamental parameters of stars; "Sources of Energy," which describes stellar interiors, energy sources, and evolution; and "Structure and Evolution of Universe," which deals with cosmology.

Despite the rigorous curriculum, astrophysics is scheduled for the end of the senior year, when most teachers lack the motivation to teach it. They skip astrophysics in favor of preparing pupils for the school-leaving examination, or give it a very superficial treatment. In 1988 to 1992, I carried out a comparative study of astrophysics education at select secondary schools in the Czech Republic, Poland, and Russia. On a didactic test, the best results were demonstrated by pupils in Poland, followed by those in the Czech Republic, and finally by those in Russia. We proposed partial changes in the Czech astrophysics curriculum and textbook to include more on photometry, the H-R diagram, and the dependence of star spectra on temperature.

The dense system of planetariums and public observatories in our country plays an important role in education. Every year, planetariums are visited by hundreds of thousands of children. In Prague is the fully automated planetarium Kosmorama, with a diameter of 25 meters and seating for 250. Brno and Ostrava have mid-sized planetariums, and smaller planetariums are in Ceske Budejovice, Hradec Kralove, Most, and Plzen. All are furnished with modern Zeiss projectors. Following the sky shows are special programs for schoolchildren with slides, telescopes, and simulations on the PC. The general public has enjoyed special presentations on Halley's comet, supernova 1987A, and the Jupiter comet impacts.

The country has about 30 public observatories. Amateurs have produced meaningful data concerning comets, meteors, occultations, and variable stars. Their data are often used by professional astronomers. Several new popular books written by professional astronomers have been published recently, such as The Universe, The Universe Is Our World by Jiri Grygar and The Universe Around Us by Josip Kleczek. The popular scientific magazine, Rise hvezd ("The Realm of Stars"), has been published in the Czech language since 1920.

The largest astronomical research center in the Czech Republic is the Astronomical Institute of the Czech Academy of Science near Prague at Ondrejov. Solar research is a long- standing tradition in Ondrejov. There are radio telescopes, instruments for observing the fine structure of the solar photosphere and chromosphere, a spectrograph for studying rapid processes in the Sun, and a spectrograph for measuring magnetic fields. The institute cooperates in the field of solar physics with similar centers worldwide.

The stellar investigations were boosted by the installation of a 2-meter telescope in Ondrejov during the 13th General Assembly of the IAU in Prague in 1967. This telescope has studied `Be' stars, peculiar `A' stars, novae, close binaries, and stellar atmospheres. Ondrejov astronomers also study meteors and meteorites and model the distribution of matter in the Galaxy.

Research on stars and interstellar and interplanetary matter also takes place at Charles University in Prague and Masaryk University in Brno, which also educate professional astronomers. These departments use 65- and 60-centimeter reflectors for photoelectric photometry.

Science and education have substantially changed in our country over the past five years. We have greater access to scientific information from around the world, via email and professional conferences, which we can attend now that restrictions on travel have been lifted. But there are fewer sources of financial support. The budget of Masaryk University, for example, has not changed in the past two years despite annual inflation of 12 percent. The Czech Republic has not the money for state support of basic research, a predicament our colleagues elsewhere seem to be sharing.

VLADIMIR STEFL is a professor in the Department of Theoretical Physics and Astrophysics at Masaryk University in Brno, Jihomoravsky, Czech Republic. His email address is stefl@csbrmu11.bitnet.

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