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Cerberus Game | Crowdsourcing, E-learning and Outreach

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The Cerberus Game platform: E-learning, Crowdsourcing, Outreach, and Serious game initiative

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Much more complex: a java applet to simulate glaxy mergers and interactions. Comes with a set of didactic activites

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This is an interactive java applet which allows you to model galaxy collisions on your own computer. With this applet you can study how galaxies collide and merge gravitationally and how the effects of the collision depend on the properties of the galaxies. You can also recreate collisions between real interacting galaxies observed in the sky.

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Build a solar system that last for 500 years. The more it is complex, and the more it survives, the higher the score!

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Super Planet Crash - Can you feel the gravity?

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The best of all, IMHO. It works on any platform (not mobile!). You can even change the gravity law and see what happens.

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Fling planets and change physics in this gravity sandbox. Want to add 1000 planets? Go ahead. Curious about Lagrange Points? Make em. Hate the inverse square law? Change it.

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Planetary on your PC

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Stellarium is a free open source planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope.

features

sky

default catalogue of over 600,000 stars

extra catalogues with more than 177 million stars

default catalogue of over 80,000 deep-sky objects

extra catalogue with more than 1 million deep-sky objects

asterisms and illustrations of the constellations

constellations for 40+ different cultures

images of nebulae (full Messier catalogue)

realistic Milky Way

very realistic atmosphere, sunrise and sunset

the planets and their satellites

all-sky surveys (DSS, HiPS)

interface

a powerful zoom

time control

multilingual interface

fisheye projection for planetarium domes

spheric mirror projection for your own low-cost dome

graphical interface and extensive keyboard control

telescope control

visualisation

several coordinate grids

precession circles

star twinkling

shooting stars

tails of comets

eclipse simulation

supernovae and novae simulation

exoplanet locations

3D sceneries

skinnable landscapes with spheric panorama projection

customizability

plugin system adding artifical satellites, ocular simulation, telescope control and more

ability to add new solar system objects from online resources...

add your own deep sky objects, landscapes, constellation images, scripts...

news

system requirements

minimal

Linux/Unix; Windows 7 and above; macOS 10.15 and above

3D graphics card which supports OpenGL 2.1 and GLSL 1.3 or OpenGL ES 2.0

512 MiB RAM

600 MiB on disk

Keyboard

Mouse, Touchpad or similar pointing device

recommended

64-bit operating system

Linux/Unix; Windows 10 and above; macOS 11.0 and above

3D graphics card which supports OpenGL 3.3 and above

1 GiB RAM or more

1.5 GiB on disk

Keyboard

Mouse, Touchpad or similar pointing device

Moderately dark environment (deep shadow or indoors)

developers

Project coordinator: Fabien Chéreau
Graphic designer: Martín Bernardi
Developers: Alexander V. Wolf, Georg Zotti, Guillaume Chéreau
Sky cultures researcher: Susanne M. Hoffmann
Collaborators: Ruslan Kabatsayev, Worachate Boonplod, Jocelyn Girod and everyone else in the community.

financial support

Many individuals and organizations are supporting the development of Stellarium by donations, and the most generous financial contributors (with donations of $250 or more) are Laurence Holt, Jeff Moe (Spacecruft), Astronomie-Werkstatt "Sterne ohne Grenzen", John Bellora, Vernon Hermsen, Triplebyte, Marla Pinaire, Satish Mallesh, Vlad Magdalin.

social media

collaborate

You can learn more about Stellarium, get support and help the project from these links:

acknowledgment

If the Stellarium planetarium was helpful for your research work, the following acknowledgment would be appreciated:
This research has made use of the Stellarium planetarium
Zotti, G., Hoffmann, S. M., Wolf, A., Chéreau, F., & Chéreau, G. (2021). The Simulated Sky: Stellarium for Cultural Astronomy Research. Journal of Skyscape Archaeology, 6(2), 221-258. https://doi.org/10.1558/jsa.17822

Or you may download the BibTeX file of the paper to create another citation format.

git

The latest development snapshot of Stellarium is kept on github. If you want to compile development versions of Stellarium, this is the place to get the source code.

supporters and friends

Stellarium is produced by the efforts of the developer team, with the help and support of the following people and organisations .

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Stellarium is a free open source planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope.

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Uploaded by EU Space Awareness on 2016-09-13.

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By far the core of the whole course. includes everything in module 2,3,

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Instructive card games for kids

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Introduction

The Solar System, in which we live, consists of the Sun as its central star, eight planets with their moons and several dwarf planets. Together with hundreds of thousands of asteroids (boulders from the size of small pebbles to the size of a dwarf planet) and comets, these celestial bodies orbit the Sun.

The Earth is a very special planet among these celestial bodies. It is our home! In order to understand its uniqueness, students need to compare the Earth to the other planets in the Solar System. The Earth is located about 150 million kilometres from the Sun, giving a temperature that is exactly right for liquid water to be present on the surface, unlike on other planets. This proved crucial for the development of life!

The Solar System as a whole is part of the Milky Way galaxy, a collection of about 200 billion stars that are arranged in a spiral, along with gas and dust. Billions of these stars have planets and these, in turn, have moons. This suggests that we are probably not alone in the Milky Way, but the distances between the stars are so big that a visit to another world would be very difficult.

Credit: Wikimedia Common / Nick Risinger / NASA / JPL

Even the star nearest to us, Proxima Centauri, is 4.22 light years (i.e., over 40 trillion kilometres) away from us. This is so distant that a journey there would take generations of human lives.

Credit: UNAWE / C.Provot

Planets that orbit stars other than our Sun are called extrasolar planets or exoplanets for short. Astronomers have already discovered thousands of these exoplanets and regularly discover more. We can categorise the planets of our Solar System into two types: rocky planets, which are nearest to the Sun and have a solid surface, and gas giants, which are farther from the Sun and are more massive and mainly composed of gas. Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars appear in the former category, and Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune make up the latter. Pluto, our formerly outermost planet, has been considered a dwarf planet since 2006. Between Mars and Jupiter is a so-called asteroid belt, which circles the Sun like a ring. It consists of thousands of smaller and larger boulders. The largest of these have their own names, just like the planets. One of them, Ceres, is so large that it is considered a dwarf planet.

The planets

Planets are spherical bodies orbiting a star. They have sufficient mass to have purged their orbits of all larger and smaller boulders thanks to their gravitational pull. Dwarf planets are also spherical and orbit a star, but they have small masses and therefore such weak gravity that they are not capable of attracting smaller boulders in their vicinity. Currently (in 2016) five dwarf planets have been identified: Ceres, Pluto, Haumea, Makemake and Eris. Moons are often spherical as well, depending on their size, but they orbit planets.

Each of the planets in our Solar System has very specific features. We have summarised them in the fact files below. The following rule of thumb is valid in the Solar System: small planets lie close to the Sun and are made of solid material, while large planets are farther away from the Sun and are mainly composed of gas. This is not necessarily true for planets around other stars, some of which have planets like Jupiter much closer to their star than Mercury is to the Sun in our Solar System.

Rocky Planets

The four rocky planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars) are very dense (solid) and comparatively small. Their atmospheres are very thin or non-existent (Mercury), with the exception of that of Venus.

Mercury

Mercury is the planet nearest to the Sun. It has no atmosphere and its solid surface, like that of our Moon, is covered with many craters. Mercury orbits the Sun once in just 88 days and has no moons. There are severe temperature differences on its surface: 380° C on the side facing the Sun, and -180° C on the night side! This is because day and night shift very slowly on Mercury, because of its slow spin. Also, there is no atmosphere to trap the heat at night.

Credit: NASA

Venus

Venus is about as large as the Earth. Carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas) makes up 99% of its atmosphere, which causes sunlight to get trapped in this mega greenhouse. Whether it is day or night, it is always very hot on Venus: almost 500° C! While the other Solar System planets rotate in the same direction, anticlockwise, Venus rotates backwards, clockwise.

Credit: NASA

Earth

Earth is the only planet in the Solar System that has liquid water on its surface, significant amounts of oxygen in the air and moderate temperatures. It orbits the Sun once a year. Its stable axis (inclined 23 degrees) results in seasons. Furthermore, it is the only celestial body on which we have found life so far.

Credit: NASA

Mars

Mars is half the size of the Earth. Its reddish colour is caused by iron oxide (rust). It has a very thin atmosphere, which mainly consists of carbon dioxide. One of its special features is its many extinct volcanoes, which reach heights of up to 22,000 metres! Mars has two very small moons and needs about twice as much time as the Earth to orbit the Sun. Like Earth, it also has seasons, as its rotation axis is inclined.

Credit: NASA

Gas Giants

The 'gas giants' are so-called because they are large compared to other planets and they are composed mostly of gas. They consist of a thick atmosphere and a relatively small solid core.

Jupiter

Jupiter is the largest planet in our Solar System. Like all giant planets, it mainly consists of gas and has a small solid core and a thin ring system. It has a remarkable red spot on its surface that is twice the size of the Earth! This spot is a huge storm (a cyclone) that has been raging for more than 400 years. It has at least 67 moons (in 2016) and is composed mainly of hydrogen and helium.

Credit: NASA

Saturn

Saturn is surrounded by large rings and therefore earns its nickname 'Lord of the rings'. These rings consist of numerous small ice grains. Saturn's atmosphere has a fairly low density: Saturn is the only planet in the Solar System that could float on water. It has many moons: more than 60 (62 in 2016) and many more unnamed 'moonlets'.

Credit: NASA

Uranus

Uranus has a few thin rings. Its surface looks very smooth and barely shows any structure. It has 27 known moons (2016).

Credit: NASA

Neptune

Neptune's surface has a blue colour, like that of Uranus. White clouds fly over its surface at speeds of over 1000 km/hr. Neptune's path sometimes crosses the orbit of dwarf planet Pluto. The planet has a thin ring system and 14 known moons (2016).

Credit: NASA

Dwarf Planet: Pluto

Pluto is composed of ice and rock. In 2006, astronomers decided that Pluto should no longer be classed as a planet but only a dwarf planet, although it is spherical. Due to its low mass, it cannot attract smaller boulders in its vicinity, as the 'real' planets do. Pluto has one larger and two smaller moons. Currently, in 2016, there are 4 other planets considered as dwarf planets that could be added to the game on an equal standing with Pluto: Ceres, Haumea, Makemake, and Eris.

Our knowledge of the Solar System

Astronomy research and tools evolve and improve very quickly. Our knowledge about space including our Solar System is extensive but not complete and it is constantly growing. Therefore, data given in the present resource might become incomplete or inaccurate over time. This might be illustrated with Pluto, considered for many years as the ninth planet of the Solar System and today identified as a dwarf planet.

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The Solar System, in which we live, consists of the Sun as its central star, eight planets with their moons and several dwarf planets. Together with hundreds of thousands of asteroids (boulders from the size of small pebbles to the size of a dwarf planet) and comets, these celestial bodies orbit the Sun.

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MOOC1-Module2: Part2 - Rethinking your teaching style

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MOOC1-Module2: Keys for successful inquiry in the science classroom

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2. Working with Inquiry in Science Classroom

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2. Working with Inquiry in Science Classroom

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IMHO the core of the whole course. Especially for me, since I do not know anything about this kind of learning style. (and I feel I really should!)

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Material for children aged 4-10. I especially liked the "Universe in a box" booklet, and the instructions on how to build it yourself.

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Universe Awareness: inspiring every child with our wonderful cosmos.

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Not the module most useful to me, since it is mostly aimed to primary school. Still, I have a 4 years old child, so...

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In December 2015, British ESA Astronaut Tim Peake blasted off to the International Space Station for Mission Principia – and two Raspberry Pi computers with a special add-on board are ready for him. As part of his mission, he’ll be running experiments which utilise the board’s sensors, created and coded by school students.

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The European Astro Pi Challenge is an ESA Education project run in collaboration with the Raspberry Pi Foundation. It offers young people the amazing opportunity to conduct scientific investigations in space, by writing computer programs that run on Raspberry Pi computers on board the International Space Station!

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astro-pi-guide - A guide to using the Sense HAT

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Build a can-sized satellite, send it at a few hundred meters of height.

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Explore what the Learning Designer tool offers as part of " Blended and Online Learning Design", a free online UCL course on FutureLearn, for teachers in all sectors.

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* Use of engaging and innovative tools/metohd
* Use of the Inquiry template
* Well aligned with learning oputcomes (activities and assessment are linked with learning outcomes and allow to determine if the objectives were achieved
* Balanced (at least 4 different tuypes of activities, none with more than 35%). Collaboration should be well represented

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The peer assessment experience of a Turkish teacher trainer and secondary school language teacher

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My own project: outer and inner planet in the Solar System

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My own project: outer and inner planet in the Solar System

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Students are encouraged to understand why inner planets are much smaller than outer planets. The physical reason they will find is that the inner planets, being near the Sun, are too hot; lighter elements, which provide the vast majority of the mass available to build a planet, quickly reach the escape velocity andare dissipated in the space. Outer planets, on the other hand, are cold enough to retain hydrogen and helium, and so can pile up very large bodies.

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The third review: Choose a space career! by Mirela Bacita

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The third review: Choose a space career! by Mirela Bacita

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A nice lesson plan about choosing a science career, ending up with using some good example of Citizen Science.

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Scientix collects and promotes best practices in science teaching and learning in Europe, and organises trainings and workshops for STEM teachers

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The lesson focuses on craters and their impact on the surface and characteristics of different celestial bodies.
After a short introduction using a youtube video, students are driven through two different experiences: one allows them to handle real data images by using a simplified version of a professional data analysis tool; the second one investigates the relation between physical impact parameters and the size of the outcoming crater, using a web simulator.

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Without your peer team, address the following questions: Which variables of the asteroid have a similar effect on the crater size? Why do you think asteroid density and diameter have a similar effect? What is the physical property of the asteroid that depends on these two variables?

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Your internet browser does not support the HTML5 features required for Crater Impact. Consider installing one of the following bowsers.

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Lots (and I mean lots) of astronomical activities)

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Lots (and I mean lots) of astronomical activities)

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http://www.euhou.net/
Including salsaj software for data analysis of real data, many exercises for students and informations about how to build an observatory in your school.

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The second review: Craters in the Solar System, by Dellia-Raissa Fortu

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The second review: Craters in the Solar System, by Dellia-Raissa Fortu

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The first review: solar system characteristic, by Julieta Flores

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The first review: solar system characteristic, by Julieta Flores

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A very interesting lesson about scientific notation applied to the solar system. First, students are required to use their digital skills to search information about a planet on the Internet, synthesize this information in a Padlet and present it to the class. Then, they will first create a sort of scale model of the solar system using edible items. Finally, with the help of their teacher a complete 3D model of the solar system will be build using geogebra.

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These activities'aim is for students to learn about mathematics, specifically Basic powers 10 and Scientific Notation, Scales and Proportions, by creating analogies related to the size and distance between the objects. To motivate students for the study of mathematics, space and astronomy. To promote the knowledge and to better realize mathematical concepts.

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A first, spectacular example of inquiry

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❓ What's in the box? | Science Museum Group's Mystery Boxes classroom activity | #STEM

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This comes from module 4, but I feel this is another possible place. :)

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Teachers TV: KS3/4 Science - Girls in Physics

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In this programme, physics teacher, Barry Berndes demonstrates how he keeps his female students motivated and engaged by following the five golden rules for Girls in Physics. Observing his lesson is Martin Hollins from the Institute of Physics who is keen to see how well the rules work.

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4.1 Diversity and gender balance in classroom

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4.1 Diversity and gender balance in classroom

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Ok, I wasn't terribly inspired by this module. May be it's because in my contest I can't find any difference in how girls and boys approach science (in fact, the best students are often girls). However, this video was awesome!

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The site is very interesting, and a real mine of astronomical curiosity. Still, its content appear to be aimed to young kids (8-11 years old), so most of the material can't be applied to my contest (senior high school with scientific curriculum) without modifications. However, this does not need it cannot be of any help.

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Being an ex-astrophysicist myself, I often use examples from my old experience in my physics lessons. Astronomy is no more really part of the Italian physics curriculum, but it still provides a fascinating XXX where you can create exercises for your students and
For instance, one possible way to introduce your students to Newton's first law (the law of inertia) to your students is the historical approach: you start with Galileo's pair of inclined planes and proceed reasoning about what would happen if the second plane had inclination zero. It cenrtainly works, and students will grasp the concept.
OR, you could start talking about the trip of Voyager 1. Tell them that the Voyager 1 spacecraft run out of fuel and stopped the engines more than 35 years ago. But it's still running away from the Sun, engines stopped, at a velocity of more than 60000 km/h.
Now, while both approach are reasonable, in my experience the last one bring complete silence in the classroom, awe and following excitement.
Space science is one of the best tool to raise the attention of your students and bring interest in what you are saying.

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I work at the Liceo  I. Nievo in Padova, an italian high school with a scientific curriculum.
We have about 950 students aged 14-19, who end their study with the Italian State exam at K13.
We do have an interactive whiteboard in every classrom, and two classes "2.0", that is, classes where tablet and digital books replaced the traditional, paper books.

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Hi all,

my name is Ezio Pignatelli. I teach math and Physics in a high school in Padova, Italy. Before being a teacher, however, I have been an astrophysicist for 12 years. I got my degree in Pisa, then I worked in Padova, both for the Astronomy Department of the University and for the astronomical Observatory. I also worked in Trieste, in SISSA. Then, I have been teaching in the high school since 2003.

Having been an astrophysicist probably means I know about the scientific content of part of this course, but certainly doesn’t mean I have any idea about how to use this content for didactic purpose.

This is the reason why enrolled, and this is the reason why I am eager to start reading – and learning.