Some Astronomy Links for Middle School Teachers
Please note that this list is not meant to be exhaustive, since you wouldn't
have time to read it if it were. Instead, it is a mere sampling of links
which I suspect could be of use to a middle school teacher.
I've heavily skewed the list toward the solar system, since I suspect
that kids are more interested in this than in stellar nucleosynthesis,
interstellar gas clouds, Big Bang cosmology, and so on.
Exhaustive lists of useful astronomy sites
Astronomical Society of the Pacific
NASA Goddard
Education
NASA Spacelink
NASA
High Energy Astrophysics Center "WebStars"
AstroWeb
Neat pictures
Clementine
mission (The Moon)
The Web Nebulae
Anglo-Australian Observatory
(great color photos)
Hubble photo
gallery
The Messier
catalog
Solar System (general)
The Nine Planets (my favorite
astronomy site)
Views of
the Solar System (not bad either)
Windows to the Universe (choose one of three difficulty levels)
The Sun
Yohkoh mission Public Outreach
Project (including a tutorial)
Another tutorial
Hands-on solar
learning activities
Sunspots (The Exploratorium)
For recent solar images/movies at many wavelengths, click here
or here or
here
SPARTAN 201 mission
The Moon
Lunar Prospector mission lesson
plans (try Unit 1)
Lunar phases tutorial
Sidereal month, synodic month, and eclipses (just keep clicking "Next")
Mars
Center for Earth and
Planetary Studies
NASA Mars missions (rovers, Global Surveyor, Odyssey, etc.
NASA "Live
from Earth and Mars"
Jupiter
Galileo
mission
Saturn
Cassini mission
Asteroids
Near Earth Asteroid
Rendezvous mission
Comets
SKY Online's Comet
Page
STARDUST mission
(NOTE: No matter which solar system object you're interested in, it's
likely that there's been or will soon be a spacecraft to study it--and
an "educational outreach" Web page to go with the spacecraft. I've only
listed a few such objects/pages above.)
Aurora Borealis
The Aurora (U. Alaska Fairbanks)
The Sun-Earth Connection (a short tutorial)
Planets being discovered around other stars
How Stuff Works article
New
York Times article
Info from the searchers themselves
Distances
Building a scale model of the solar system
Lab exercises for measuring distances in the Sun-Earth-Moon system
Distances beyond the Solar System
Exotica
Black holes and neutron
stars
Extragalactic Astronomy
Galaxies
Cosmology (not a topic I'd recommend for kids)
Introduction to Cosmology (NASA)
The Big Bang
Cosmos in a Computer
The accelerating universe
Astronomy using different kinds of light (particularly X-rays and gamma
rays)
NASA High-Energy
Astrophysics Learning Center
Resources for amateurs and teachers
Lake Afton Public
Observatory
Ames Area Amateur Astronomers
Sky & Telescope
On-line article archive
The Universe in the
Classroom (The Astronomical Society of the Pacific)
Introductions to sky observing
Jack
Troeger's Internet Astronomy Course
"Ask an Astronomer" features
Dr. Sten
Odenwald
Lick Observatory
Ask
a NASA Scientist
Mr Sunspot
Answers to frequently asked questions
Virginia Tech
Astronomy sites explicitly created by or for middle school students
Hands-On Universe
Reach Out! Michigan
Other K-12 astronomy sites that could work for middle school
StarChild
(NASA)
The Center for
Science Education (don't skip the "Science
Education Gateway" link)
Project
Athena
Astronomical Society of the Pacific links to astronomy activities
Constellations (which isn't a science topic, but in case someone asks....)
The Constellations and their Stars
Interactive Sky Chart (from Sky & Telescope)
Some Astronomy Links for Middle School Teachers
Compiled by Chris Magri
URL: http://academic.umf.maine.edu/~magri/K12/astro/MiddleLinks.html