Heavenly mathematics & cultural astronomy: A course at the National University of Singapore

Abstract

I have introduced a general education course called Heavenly Mathematics and Cultural Astronomy [2] at the National University of Singapore. The goal of this course is to study astronomy in a cultural context with a tropical emphasis. Most astronomy books are written from a high northern latitude point of view, but Singapore is almost on the equator, so I aim to be "hemispherically-correct". Singapore is also a multi-racial society, where public holidays are determined using the Gregorian, Chinese, Islamic and Indian calendars. The course starts with an introduction to observational astronomy with an emphasis on the appearance of the Sun and the Moon from different parts of the world. I then give a fairly detailed description of the Gregorian, Chinese, Islamic and Indian calendars [1, 4, 5], and finish with a thorough discussion of the analemma, equation of time and navigation [3]. Being a mathematician, my approach is quite mathematical, but my emphasis is on geometrical reasoning. Formulas and computations may scare some students away, but they are surprisingly willing to struggle with complicated spatial visualization. © 2010 American Institute of Physics.