Stellarium was included as a session at the Galileo Teacher Training Workshop, organized by the European Space Agency in Amsterdam in June 2009. As part of the International Year of Astronomy, I thought this program should be explored.
Stellarium is an open source 3D planetarium program that works in real-time and has a database of over 600,000 stars, and can be downloaded from http://www.stellarium.org, a user guide can be found at Stellarium User Guide
The first thing to do after installation is to customize the view to your city, and your time. This will give you an accurate picture of the sky above you. It is easy to use the arrow keys on the keyboard to smoothly orientate and see the sky from different directions. You can zoom in to parts of the sky, and click on any star to see a collection of statistics pertinent to that star.
Stellarium offers many options for the classroom, it is like having your own 3D planetarium. The big difference here is that you can travel virtually to anywhere, staying earthbound is optional. Not just for astronomy, this program has depth offering cultural details of the constellations, plenty of statistics for math teachers, fabulous for use with the projector and could even be used as writing prompts. If, after exploring the standard download, you want more, there are add on databases to download more stars and scripts that take you to a certain spot in the universe. The scripting language is also open source so students could even write their own.
Ideas for the Classroom
The Sky Tonight Screencasts
The BBC program “The sky at night” with Patrick Moore is the longest running show on the BBC, that popularity could easily flow into an astronomy class production by students of the “sky over our school tonight” screencast using a program such as www.screenr.com or Jing (www.jingproject.com). These screencasts would feature points of interest, planets, visible constellations. After recording these could be embedded on the school website or a course wiki.
Interstellar journeys
The feature to set your location to another planet, or a moon of a planet could make a interesting lesson. Students are assigned a different planet or moon from the database, and they are to describe what they could see in the night sky, how bright these objects would be, how far away from home they are. Then these experiences could be presented to the rest of the class using the projector.
Earthbound Journeys
The feature to set the location to different cities around the world could be utilized by assigning students different cities. They would make observations, take screenshots, get together in groups and compare and contrast the view from different parts of our planet. The light pollution feature could also be included in this lesson, comparing the effect in differently populated areas.
Constellations and Star Lore
For cultural understanding and awareness, Stellarium contains information about the different constellations from the perspective of different cultures. Students could research and interpret how these myths, naming systems and folklores impacted culture at different times in our history and how these stories still have impact today.
Have students pick out their own constellation and make up their own star lore.
Putting it all in perspective
How big are the objects floating in the universe and how big can they get? Watch this youtube video about star size.
Then have the students search for the stars in Stellarium to get and idea of where they are and how far away they are using the statistics
Using the statistics
One example of using stellarium is in calculating star altitudes and can be seen in this youtube video of an astronomy lab
The statistics could be used in many ways in math and physics classes. Data is real-time and useful for populating databases, pulling out information and drawing conclusions. Example question might include: Do the brightness statistics correllate with distance and size.
Real-time Sky Watching
How does the sky above change over time and why does that happen? Stellarium is running in real-time, so if you take some screenshots in the afternoon of the sky and make note of major objects and their position. Leave Stellarium running overnight, then compare where those major objects are now and have the students explain why that is.
Sharing
More lesson materials can be found at the Stellarium user wiki. If you decide to use Stellarium with your classes this would be a useful place to describe your lesson and experiences so that other teachers and students can take advantage of your work.
Related blog post: http://www.annbrundigestudio.com/2008/11/05/stellarium/
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1 comment
WENDY says:
October 14, 2010 at 10:35 pm (UTC -5 )
when i started reading i thought it was going to be filled with useless advice, but really it came out to be quite interesting. bravo!