When Stock Photos Don’t Cut It
In an astronomy unit on stellar magnitude, I ran into a problem. The concepts involved — the sizes, scales, and energies of different types of stars — are so vast they can really only be expressed accurately in numbers. Stock photography of the real thing failed to get the point across. Students were clicking through without any sense of what they were actually looking at.
I scrapped the stock assets and built my own. Custom illustrations to depict scale and magnitude in a way the eye could actually process. Interactive side-by-sides to compare different star types directly. Star charts students could use to find what they’d learned in their own night sky. A flowchart mapping the full life cycle of a star — because a linear click-through couldn’t carry that kind of information.
The lesson became something students could actually reason with, not just read.
