More kids’ astronomy fun with free stuff on the Internet!
As much fun as it is to take the whole family on an astronomy outing, it’s easy to find fun astronomy tools at home, too — for free on the Internet! Today my kids would like to recommend to you some of their favorites. To give credit where credit is due, my husband found all of these free software programs and videos, but I helped the kids watch, discuss, and play with them. 
First up: Celestia: a 3-D space exploration simulator that you can download free.
Nico took all the screenshots himself — as we saw in love of learning and LSG’s adventures, kids learn by example and often take an interest in activities their parents enjoy! In my case — through my hobby of writing illustrated articles — I’ve inadvertently taught them to enjoy taking screenshots to post.
Nico: Jupiter has a lot of moons, and this is a picture of Jupiter with one of its moons in front of it. First I navigated to Jupiter and then I navigated to this moon.
me: This program has a browser that allows the kids to select and travel to anything in space — zooming in on asteroids and out on whole galaxies — then rotating the image in 3-D to view it from different angles. Even though Leo is still learning the dexterity to be able to color inside of the lines, like other kids these days he’s already quite adept at navigating through menus with the mouse. In this case, he can find the planets he wants to see without any help:
Leo: This is Saturn. Is it beautiful?
Nico: Yes. I’ve navigated to Saturn, and I’ve rotated it until I saw the rings around the planet.
Next, more free astronomy software! Stellarium shows you shows you what you can see up in the sky — right now — where you are! It’s a convenient resource to help you find the planets easily so you can see them for yourself!
Nico: This is Zürich as a planet so you can see what happens above Zürich at night!
Then, Eyes on the Skies, a film about the history of the telescope! You can watch the film online, then stick around and watch the Hubblecast, which is a short video program where astronomer Dr. J tells about the latest discoveries fron the Hubble space telescope, such as the recent direct visible-light observation of an extra-solar planet!
Nico: This is Dr. J watching pictures of new nebulas.
me: Did he see these with his telescope?
Nico: No. William Herschel saw these new nebulas with his telescope.
me: So before the telescope, people couldn’t see these?
Nico: Yeah, before the telescope, people couldn’t see these.
me: What’s a nebula?
Nico: A nebula is like a galaxy.
Nico: The Milky Way Galaxy has a magestic spiral shape, but this is the Whirlpool Nebula which also has a magestic spiral shape. The Whirlpool Nebula is the closest galaxy from the Milky Way.
me: It is? Are you sure?
Nico: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just write that down.
Nico: This is the European Extremely Large Telescope! It’s 42 meters in diameter! Its mirror is as large as a swimming pool. The European Extremely Large Telescope is too big to be a refracting telescope. The largest refracting telescope is 18 meters long, and its main lens is 1 meter across.
I’m not fact-checking any of this, so look it up before quoting.
I’m not sure it comes through from the random collection of facts, but Nico really liked this film about the telescope, and has been excitedly telling me all about Galileo Galilei, and about space telescopes, etc. He liked it so much that my husband went back to the website and ordered a DVD about the Hubble Space Telescope. We’ll tell you about it when it arrives!
Glen Said,
November 26, 2008 @ 2:00 pm
I was tracking shadows on the ground for about a week with my 5 year old.
Which, made me think of this.
Cool things to do with Stellarium (version 0.10):
Bring up the date and time window (F5).
Modify the time to be noon or so.
Make sure you can see the sun. (Click with mouse and drag.)
Now, advance the day, click by click.
Watch the sun (and stars) move to a slightly new spot each day.
Here’s another.
Turn off ground [G], cardinal points [Q] and atmosphere [A]
Change your location [F6] to the moon
Find object [control-F] and enter Earth
Click on screen and drag the Earth to the middle of the screen
Speed up time [L] about 4 or 5 times
Jim Said,
November 26, 2008 @ 3:25 pm
If your kid (who seems very smart, by the way) wants to move outside the visible spectrum, http://coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu/ is a treasure trove for infrared astronomy (and infrared a bunch of other stuff, too — including animals). The videos alone are worth it!
the chaplain Said,
November 26, 2008 @ 3:50 pm
Great programs and screen shots. You and your kids obviously have a blast with this stuff.
chanson Said,
November 26, 2008 @ 11:21 pm
Glen — thanks for the tips, maybe I’ll try those!
I hadn’t been actively working the program at all — I just let my five and seven year old kids figure it out on their own and show me what it could do. Mostly they like to orient the view striaght down (so the ground is a circle surrnounded by sky, as in the screenshot ) or orient it straight up (so the sky is a circle surrounded by ground ). But my husband is thinking of getting them a telescope for Christmas, at which point we’ll probably get some real use out of the program to find items to look for in the sky.
Jim — Thanks, I’ll take a look! From the telescope videos, Nico has learned about viewing things outside the visible spectrum, so he’d probably like those videos.
Chaplain — Thanks! Nico is so funny with his screenshots. He’s constantly filling his hard drive with screenshots from all the films he watches and from software like these. As I said, I started taking screenshots of films myself when I was doing film reviews for some of the other blogs I write for, and the kids thought it was cool and wanted to do it too!
Tux Paint! Said,
June 25, 2009 @ 9:33 am
[...] software application for kids. It’s not going to teach your kids science (like the astronomy software I reviewed), but rather it provides a blank canvas with some pretty amazing tools they can use to express [...]