Anyone Into Astronomy?

lovelylil

My kids are really interested in astronomy lately and it has never been my area of expertise. They don't do much in school on it, just a few basics. So I thought we could do more at home. Can anyone recomend a good beginners guide to astronomy and maybe a good website for helping kids learn about this topic? Also we have a telescope but don't really use it much, can I get copies of sky maps online? Thanks. Lilly

misanthropic

If you have a planetaruim there they'd probably love that if you haven't taken them already.
Otherwise for a book they could look at and read about the different planets I would recommend The Oxford Astronomy Encyclopedia.
I'm not sure about online sites but there's a place here that sells telescopes and they stay open late into the night and let people just tool around with their telescopes that they have set up outside, maybe there's something like that where you are.

troubled mind

My son and husband are into astronomy . We just bought a globe that comes with a CD it shows the planets and stars positions , I'm sure you could find it at a Toys-R-Us store .It is not just for kids it is actually great for adults too. There are several online sites we have found very educational : www.stellarium.org http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html

troubled mind

My husband and son love astronomy . We just bought this globe that has an educational cd and shines the stars and planets positions onto the ceiling . I'm sure you could find it at Toys-R-Us , it is good for kids and adults . A couple of websites we like are : www.stellarium.org/ http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html

SacrificialLoon

Sky & Telescope Has a nice starchart.
Space.com Is a nice general site about umm... space. :) I have no idea why it is prefixing my links with www.jehovahs-witness.com, so just remove that when you click on them.

betterdaze

Lil, check out this software called Starry Night, it's awesome! They have different levels of products for beginners, educators and experts.

http://www.starrynight.com/

Hayden Planetarium @ American Museum of Natural History in NY:

http://haydenplanetarium.org/resources/

http://www.amnh.org/education/resources/rfl.php?set=b&topic_id=2&intro=true

http://www.nasm.si.edu/

(Sorry, I can't make these links clickable.)

~Sue

lovelylil

Thanks everyone for your help. And thank you Sue for those great links! Peace, Lilly

Leolaia

My favorite site is Sky View Cafe (the one good suggestion JCanon ever made on this board), which gives you sky views from any location on earth for any time in history, giving not just the stars but the locations of all the planets, the phases of the moon, eclipses, orbits of the planets, even the moons of Jupiter and Saturn for any date! You can check any time in history (or thousands of years into the future) and see what the sky would look like.

http://www.skyviewcafe.com/index.php

New Worldly Translation

A program called Celestia is a lot of fun. It's a 3D universe that you can fly around in and explore.

You can download it here -

http://www.shatters.net/celestia/download.html

You can also download extra detailed planet maps, satellites, space stations etc for it.

Anyone Into Astronomy?

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