Mr Cripps' Guide to the Universe

How exactly do all of those astronomical things shape up? Which are bigger & which are smaller than others? This ppt animation shows you the relative sizes, with a little help from a collegue of mine!

Eagle Zoom

Similar kind of activity to the previous one, this time we zoom out of the Eagle Nebula

First Contact / Arecibo Message

Inspired from a lecture by Sir Patrick Moore, this is a fairly simple activity that gets pupils to think about what kind of message we would send to Aliens and how we would send it. Once they've considered various issues pupils complete a 'paint by numbers' type activity to see what Sir Patrick Moore recommends.

The is answer to this activity. Or download both files as a single zip file.

Find out what alien message NASA have put aboard the Voyager spacecraft (the only spacecraft to leave our solar system).

The Arecibo Message was a real life version of this activity. A further activity based on the Arecibo Message.

Hubble Deep Field

This is a link to the Space Observatories in School website that hosts this activity.

Pupils will use the Hubble Deep Field to estimate the number of galaxies in the universe. Lots of mathematics application here & a fair amount of wow factor too!

HDF ppt show (2.7Mb)

Powers of 10 (2nd half)

Animated gif demonstrating why standard form is useful. Goes from 10 to the power 23, 10million light years away from the Milky Way, through to 10 to the power -16, examining quarks!

Powers of 10

A good flash animation version of the animated gif (above). Only positive powers however.

Powers of 10

Arrange the 14 images in order of size, biggest to smallest (grab them, move them around). When you're done check your answer on the second slide. There's also links to the website from which the activity came and the original 1970's video on YouTube.