
Recommended Space Books for Kids, 2019 - sohkamyung
https://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/space-books-kids.html
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mncharity
Sigh. So, a common misconception in astronomy education, is that the Sun
itself is yellow. It's common even among astronomy graduate students at, err,
a first-tier institution for both astronomy research, and astronomy
_education_ research. Indeed, you can roughly guess who has/hasn't done the
'common misconceptions in astronomy education' class by asking them "[A five-
year old asks...] What color is the Sun?"

So it's utterly without surprise, but a sad commentary on the state of science
education, that I see... (via image and video search)

 _ABCs of Space_ and _8 Little Planets_ have yellow or orange Suns. _Pop-up
Peekaboo! Space_ has no Sun, but yellow stars. I had hope for _Twinkle Twinkle
Little Star: I Know Exactly What You Are_ which used white stars when
explaining twinkling... before it explicitly said the Sun was "yellow", next
to something the same-ish orange color as the "Red" dwarf a few pages back,
and one page before a yellow Sun. _Moon’s First Friends_ , and _Planet
Hunting_ , and... ah well, I'll stop there.

The handling of scale is... never mind.

To be fair to astronomy graduate students, among first-tier non-astronomy
physical-sciences graduate students, a common response is some variant of "it
doesn't have a color; it's lots of different colors; it's rainbow colored" \-
misunderstanding color, rather than a classification scheme.

If some country ever aligns its science education content incentives with the
creation of robust understanding... it's kind of hard to imagine where they
might end up. But that's not us.

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mncharity
"Launch Ladies" was a kickstarter project.[1]

[1] [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jameyerickson/launch-
la...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jameyerickson/launch-ladies-a-
childrens-book-about-the-women-of)

