Space
The LeTaS! teachers found these books to be particularly helpful:
- AIMS: Out of this World
- Exploring Space: Science Works for Kids Series
- Exploring the Solar System: A History with 22 Activities
- Galileo for Kids: His Life and Ideas
- GEMS: Moons of Jupiter Project
- Earth Science: Astronomy Science and Flight Experiments
Other helpful resources:
NASA for Educators
Has an amazing array of resources: podcasts, activities, games, and general teaching materials. For all grade levels.
NASA (General)
Great for current events, and these stories can likely be paired with materials from the Educators site.
Sky & Telescope
It is advertised as “the essential magazine for astronomy,” and it is an excellent resource. Current events articles on a general level, also more in-depth articles can be found. Also provides ample resources for amateur star-gazing – sky maps, calendars, etc.
Astronomy Magazine: Welcome to Astronomy
A great intro to the field, addressing both the science and the hobby of astronomy. Many activities for kids. At the parent site, current events stories are also good.
Heavens Above
Ever seen a moving speck in the night sky and wondered what it was? This site will tell you. Descriptions and maps for all satellites passing over your location, including manmade ones like the International Space Station, and natural phenomena like comets.
Discover Magazine: Space News
More current events in space news. Perhaps not as comprehensive of the entire field as some of the sites dedicated solely to astronomy, but the stories are just as good, and often go into several pages of detail.
Nature News
Nature itself is one of the premier academic journals for new science results in all fields, not just astronomy. Most of the formal articles require subscriptions, but the Nature News section recaps some of the top stories in a more accessible format. Also offers podcasts, which are one way to get a nice summary of the news for the week.
National Geographic: Science & Space
Polished easy-to-use site with current news. Has some kids’ activities, but most relate to earth-based sciences.
Google Sky
Much like the viewable maps of Google Earth, these allow you to explore upwards and outwards instead. You can roam around freely or examine some of the highlights of various space missions. Many of the regions and objects are well-annotated with the scientific information.
WorldWide Telescope
Similar to Google Sky, displays the images gathered by many of earth’s ground-based and space-based telescopes in spatial context. Has to be downloaded (vs. used over the internet like Google Sky) and only works on PCs (not Macs) at this point.
Ask an Astronomer
Video answers to commonly asked questions about astronomy. Also available in podcast form.
Astronomy Picture of the Day
A great daily-updated site with a glamorous astronomy picture (or sometimes video) with a paragraph explaining the scientific relevance, with links to definitions for all uncommon or jargon-type words & phrases.
Bad Astronomy
Just how fictional are movies like Deep Impact and Armageddon? Find out with the authors of Bad Astronomy, who debunk common myths and misconceptions about the field, as well as popular conspiracy theories (like the moon landing occurring on a sound stage).
Science in the News
This article tells about the largest meteoritic impact found in the United Kingdom. The large object is thought to have hit Scotland about 1.2 billion years ago. Evidence of the impact is found in rocks that were ejected from the impact area, as far as 25 kilometers away.
High levels of iridium in the area also provide evidence of extraterrestrial origin, since this is an element that is not very abundant on earth, but highly abundant in some asteroids and meteoroids.
A sizable iridium layer at several (~100) different sites around the world, due to a much more recent impact on the Yucatan peninsula 65 million years ago, helped to suggest that it was such a dramatic impact that caused many species (including many dinosaurs!) to go extinct. That is, fossils of many species found below the iridium layer (the older rock) are not found above the iridium layer (the newer rock), suggesting that these species no longer existed after the impact event.
This article lists the top ten favorite views of the Earth, taken from space, from the astronauts at the International Space Station. (Happy Earth Day!)
Views include a dramatic ash plume from an erupting volcano, the green glow of the aurora borealis (also known as the Northern Lights), the mountain peaks surrounding and including Mt. Everest, and several others.
"The X PRIZE Foundation and Google, Inc. today announced the first ten teams to register for the Google Lunar X PRIZE, a robotic race to the Moon to win a remarkable $30 million in prizes. This international group of teams will compete to land a privately funded robotic craft on the Moon that is capable of roaming the lunar surface for at least 500 meters and sending video, images and data back to the Earth."
This contest, sponsored by The X Prize Foundation and Google, Inc., is an exciting challenge to privately funded space explorers. The challenge is to land a robot on the surface of the Moon, have it travel 500 meters, and transmit data and images back to Earth. Nearly all space exploration up to this point has been government-funded, so it will be interesting to see if civilian missions will be any more successful or efficient. This article describes the 10 teams chosen for the competition.
In a related story, NASA is still planning on returning to the Moon as well. Science goals should drive the mission, and these are still uncertain. Still, some of the issues for investigation and the tools to perform the studies are described here, for example, looking for deposits of frozen water and trying to determine how to extract the water.
“In getting back to the moon, NASA space planners face overwhelming challenges: The shuttle is scheduled for retirement in 2010, the Ares rocket will not be ready until at least four years later, there is tepid support from all sides in the looming presidential election, and current estimates put the cost of getting humans back to the moon at $100 billion. (Rumors of scrapping the moon base and sending humans to asteroids instead continue to surface.) “The vision of the next 50 years,” NASA administrator Michael Griffin says, requires “a logical, incremental, stable, sustainable plan that can be executed with realistically attainable budgets.” He believes “we really can celebrate the 100th anniversary of Sputnik with the 20th anniversary of the first human landing on Mars.” But long before Mars, NASA faces tough budget and engineering battles to make sure its suits, capsules, and SUVs even get off the ground.”
The search for planets around stars other than our sun is a rapidly expanding field right now. There are several ways to find planets, and they all involve clever techniques that find a way around the main problem: while stars are very big and hot, and therefore bright, planets are comparatively small, cold, and dark, and are therefore much harder to see.
One way to find planets indirectly is to look at dusty disks that often orbit stars with young planetary systems. Gaps or rings in the dust disk can imply the presence of a planet, and this is thought to be the case for the star in this article, AB Aurigae.
“The star is about 470 light years away and, being only about one million to three million years old, is still surrounded by the dusty detritus out of which it formed. In the picture, which shows the intensity of so-called polarized light scattered off dust particles, there is a gap about nine billion miles from the star, roughly three times the distance from Earth to Neptune.”
** this site may require you to log in, but registration for the NY Times site is free
This is a fantastic way to explore the sky conveniently, in the classroom or at home. Plus, one of the nice things about such a program is that it's composed of real scientific research quality data, not just artist's renderings. I'll be exploring this myself in the coming days and weeks, and I'd encourage you all to as well!
“Microsoft has launched WorldWide Telescope, a free tool that stitches together images from some of the best ground- and space-based telescopes.
Collections include pictures from the Hubble and Spitzer telescopes, as well as the Chandra X-Ray Observatory.
The web-based tool also allows users to pan and zoom around the planets, and trace their locations in the night sky.
"Users can see the X-ray view of the sky, zoom into bright radiation clouds, and then cross-fade into the visible light view and discover the cloud remnants of a supernova explosion from a thousand years ago," explained Roy Gould, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
"[It's] a beautiful platform for explaining and getting people excited about astronomy, and I think the professional astronomers will come to use it as well," said Roy Williams of the California Institute of Technology.”
“About a century ago, the light from the explosion of a star within our galaxy swept past Earth.
No one noticed.
Such explosions, called supernovas, can shine brightly in the night sky. But this dying star was close to the center of the galaxy, where thick dust and gas blocked most of the light, and astronomers of the era saw nothing.”
This is the youngest, i.e. most recently seen by us on earth, supernova. Light from this supernova first could have reached us only 140 years ago (the blink of an eye on astronomical timescales), but the star generating this supernova exploded about 26,000 years ago. This source is 26,000 light-years away from us in the Milky Way galaxy, and so it takes that many years for light (moving at the speed of light) to reach us.
Still, the supernova wasn't seen immediately because the optical light, the same light our eyes can see, was blocked by dust in the galaxy. Longer and shorter wavelengths of light, like radio and x-ray wavelengths, can penetrate the dust though, and that's where we see this supernova remnant now.
“...most Americans are unable to see the Milky Way in the sky above the place where they live, and those who can see it are sometimes baffled by its name.
The stars have not become dimmer; rather, the Earth has become vastly brighter, so that celestial objects are harder to see. Air pollution has made the atmosphere less transparent and more reflective, and high levels of terrestrial illumination have washed out the stars overhead...”
An interesting review of how our skies have become light-polluted, preventing us from seeing most celestial objects that should be visible to the naked eye. Still, some dark sky preservation groups are working hard to help communities reduce their light pollution levels.