Education how-to materials

Downloading Stellarium

Stellarium is a free, open source planetarium application which allows the night sky to be viewed from any location on Earth, on any date. The software can be downloaded from www.stellarium.org, together with installation instructions.

When you open Stellarium, it adopts the date and time from your computer clock - the first screen looks similar to the image here.  read more »

Asteroids

Asteroids are rocky objects which orbit the Sun in our Solar System, but are too small to be considered planets. They are in fact, commonly known as Minor Planets due to their size. The majority of the asteroids in our Solar System orbit the Sun in what we call the ‘Asteroid Belt’. This is located between Mars and Jupiter as can be seen in the diagram below.   read more »

If you have access to the LCOGTLas Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network network provided by Faulkes Telescope Project, this video might help when planning your first observing session. The video walks you through using the control interface, so you can see what to expect. The interface is simple to use and provides plenty of assistance for inexperienced observers. If you do not know what to observe you can pick astronomical objects from one of many Guided Tours of the sky, Search for an object that you know the name of, or more advanced observers can enter your own co-ordinates.

You can also try out our interactive demo which gives you an experience of the control interface without needing to login or book observing time.  read more »

The discovery of the icy exoplanet OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb (just 5 times more massive than Earth) by the technique of gravitational microlensing provided the first observational hint that Earth-like planets are common in the Universe. The existence of this new world was revealed from a small blip in the brightness of the star, on just one night, but we will probably never be able to see it again by this method.  read more »

These instructions will take you through the steps of downloading and starting DS9.  read more »