Teaching astronomy during the daytime can be a bit of a challenge. Sure, there is an amazing amount of interesting topics you could cover, but the real attraction is the stars. Unless you live in Alaska, you are not going to be able to see the stars during the school day. Never fear, Stellarium is here!

Two apps I like to use in my classroom are Star Tracker lite and Stellarium. Allowing the students to become familiar with the night sky before they go out to search for constellations, planets, and stars has been a huge plus for my classroom.

I start off by having the students journal about what stars or constellations they have already been able to view on their own prior to taking Astronomy. Then after giving them some quick information about common constellations visible in our region, I ask them to create a vision board to capture their goals for what constellations they would like to be able to find and view by the end of the semester. They use Google Slides to create the vision boards and we are off to the next step.

I teach them how to find 15 basic constellations in our geographical area, but the real learning comes from their interaction with the Stellarium software. Our school has the mobile app downloaded on our classroom set of iPads, and I have created step by step guides to get them familiar with the app. I created tasks & questions to get them used to determining where the constellations will be in the evening when they get the opportunity to view the stars.

Account to their website, "Stellarium is a free open source planetarium for your computer." I would agree; it is as close to a personal planetarium as you can get. From my experience, Stellarium is an extremely robust app that allows for a wide variety of exploration and activities ranging from novice to expert. I would rank my students somewhere right above novice.

Later in the semester I have them use the app again for more in depth activities that include parallax, apparent and absolute magnitude, as well as star colors and temperatures.

I have included and example of 1 of my assignments below and links to a few of the activities that I have created for my astronomy class and you can access them for use below.