Gaining Holistic Insight to Inthakin Festival via Stellarium Sky-mapping

Abstract

The Stellarium, a planetarium software to visualize the ancient sky, is the most helpful software used in the Loy Krathong Module teaching in SCiUS CMU at Chiang Mai University Demonstration School. This module emphasizes astronomical content related to the festivals and beliefs in Lanna. Based on this tradition that the ancient Lanna astronomers had been using the star to determine the season. This paper demonstrated how the Stellarium software could be used as a learning tool for students to enquire, as a case study on which star is related to the Inthakin Festival in Chiangmai, Thailand. By visualizing the ancient sky, it enhanced student’s imagination of how ancient Lanna astronomers used the star to determine the rainy season related to this festival in three different periods. The software revealed that the star was the Pleiades. Furthermore, it astronomically simulated how the ancient astronomers viewed the sky, and how the star could determine the year to which one extra lunar month must be added to synchronize the Lunar year with seasons.