Teaching Mars retrograde movement using Stellarium software and video analysis

This work presents a proposal of a teaching activity that uses a simulation and a ludic experiment as a form of didactic transposition for the teaching of the apparent retrograde motion of Mars. This simulation was performed by a free software called Stellarium. In turn, the experiment used two fidget spinners coupled in order to make an analogy with the orbital movement of Earth and Mars. Both in the simulation and experiment it was made a video analysis using a free software called Tracker. The activity was ordered in the following steps: 1) Present the simulation and its video analysis to illustrate the relative movement of Mars considering the referential frame of the Earth; 2) Present the video analysis of the coupled fidget spinners movement in three different references frames, similar to the references frames of the Sun (heliocentric model), the Earth (geocentric model) and the Mars; 3) Present the video analysis of the center of mass of the fidget spinners and qualitatively describe the use of the heliocentric model, in the description of the movements of the planets of the solar system.

Keywords:
Physics teaching; Astronomy; Video analysis; Fidget spinner; Stellarium