Stellarium/Activity

What's Up?

This lesson plan was based on material created by Digitalis Education Solutions, Inc. and is provided free of charge as a public service to encourage the teaching of astronomy. It was written for use with a Digitarium planetarium system. You may need to modify this lesson to work with other systems with different capabilities.

Permission is granted by Digitalis Education Solutions to copy, distribute, and modify this document provided that existing copyright notices, the text of this license, and the text of the "Notice" section are not removed or modified, other than to add your own copyright notice for your modifications. In this modified document, please credit http://orbit.educ.cam.ac.uk/ for adaptation.

Objectives

Students will learn:

• That we can see stars in the night sky, as well as the moon and some planets;
• Some ways in which stars, planets, and the moon differ from each other;
• The difference between reflecting and emitting light;
• The definition of a constellation; and
• The shapes and stories of some currently visible constellations.

Materials required

• Computer running Stellarium Software and data projector (required)
• Flash light and extra batteries (optional)
• Small mirror (optional)
• Pictures of the sun, earth, moon, solar system (optional)
• Pictures of some constellations, including Ursa Major (optional)

Introduction (10 to 15 mins)

A) Inform students that you will be studying astronomy today. Ask students what the words 'astronomy' and 'astronomer' mean. Discuss what astronomers might study.

B) One of the things we'll be learning about is stars. [Show poster of the sun if you have one.] Why can we see the sun? Why can't we see the other stars when it's daytime? Why is the sun so important to us? What is the sun made of?

C) Some of the stars in our night sky were grouped together to make pictures. We'll be learning more about those pictures, called constellations, when we go inside the planetarium. Here are some pictures we'll be seeing. [Show posters of constellations if available ]

D) What else can we see in the sky? [Show poster of the moon if available .] What does the moon do? [Travels around Earth.] What is the moon made of? Does it make its own light? No, it doesn't make its own light, so why can we see it? Some things in our sky make light, like stars, and other things reflect light, like the moon. What does reflecting mean? When we think of reflecting, we usually think of a mirror. Mirrors certainly do reflect light [point flashlight at the mirror, with mirror aimed at the ceiling or a nearby wall if possible ], which you can see when I do this. We can see the moon because it's reflecting light from the sun back to Earth. The moon acts like this mirror to bounce light to us on Earth, and the sun acts like the flashlight—it makes light.

E) What else is in the sky? Many things, including planets. [Show poster of the solar system if available .] Do the planets make light like stars, or do they reflect light like the moon? They reflect light. What are the planets made of? It depends on the planet. Some are made of rock, like Mars and Earth, while others are made of gas, like Jupiter and Saturn. But none make their own light. Just like the moon, they reflect light from the sun, which is why we can see them.

Tonight's Sky (15 to 30 mins)

A) [When projector is working and showing night’s sky] Inform students that they're looking at the sky as it would appear at about ___ p.m./a.m. on ______ (date). Make sure that the Stellarium is set for a date when the moon and at least one planet will be visible shortly after sunset.

What do they see? Where's the sun? the moon? Ask students how they would describe the shape of the moon. Have they noticed that the moon isn't always the same shape in the sky? [If appropriate, discuss very briefly the idea of moon phases being due to the changing positions of the earth, moon, and sun.]

B) Do they see anything they think is a planet? How can we tell if we're looking at a star or a planet? Inform students that planets are often a slightly different colour than the stars in the sky and lie on or near a line called the ecliptic [display ecliptic]. Give students a few seconds to look for planets, then turn on planet labels. Select and zoom in on all visible planets. Share one or two interesting facts about each planet when you are zoomed in.

C) What do we see the most of up there? Stars. Thousands of years ago, the Greeks and Romans 'connected the dots' and made pictures in the sky; those pictures are called constellations. Today we still use many of the names they gave to their constellations. Talk about common constellations that are visible and add any extra stories if appropriate.

D) Choose at least two other constellations in different parts of the sky to share stories about.

F) Discuss the importance of some stars and constellations for navigation such as the north star in the northern hemisphere and Sigma Octantis in the southern. Emphasize that in real life, the stars don't move around the earth. Earth's rotation and orbit give us a different view of the stars throughout the night and the year.

G) OPTIONAL: turn on planet labels and planet trails. Make sure that Mercury is visible in the sky, or speed up time until Mercury is visible. Jump forward in time week by week to show students the movements of the planets against the background of the stars. Move forward in time until Mercury's trail makes a loop in the sky. [You can also run several seconds of the annual motion script to demonstrate this.]

Be sure to emphasize that Mercury and the other planets, including the Earth, are simply rotating on their axes and orbiting the sun. However, as the Earth rotates and revolves and the other planets rotate and revolve, we can end up noticing some strange patterns, like the one that Mercury made. Briefly discuss how long it takes for the Earth to make one trip around the sun, then how long it takes for two or three of the other planets to make one trip around the sun. Run the Solar System View local script to show the planets orbiting the sun.