On the Teaching With Telescopes website you’ll find information about the Galileoscope, extensive assembly directions, an observing guide, instructional videos, and classroom activities. The program naturally focuses on the Galileoscope. National Optical Astronomy Observatory, is designed to help teachers bring small telescopes into the classroom. Teaching With Telescopes, a new website from the science educators at the U.S. Galileo’s Classroom is available in a new 2nd edition from the Center for Astronomy and Physics Education Research (CAPER) you can buy it at. Each activity has been rewritten into the natural language of classroom teachers and has been field tested in schools. The activities in Galileo’s Classroom have been selected from among thousands of available astronomy-related activities, based upon their utility in modeling Galileo’s findings and on our current understanding of exemplary classroom practices. Galileo’s Classroom: Activities & Materials for Teaching Astronomy is a coherent set of educational materials that provide both content knowledge for classroom teachers and classroom-ready materials suitable for use with the Galileoscope in a variety of formal and informal settings. Galileoscope Optics Activity Guide (946-kilobyte PDF).The following optics activity guide addresses how light is bent by lenses in refracting telescopes. They learn that each little part of the lens helps form the entire image.

Most kids are surprised that the picture doesn’t get cut in half or go away but just gets a little dimmer. For example, they can investigate what happens to the image if you cover up half the lens. As the telescope is being built, students can conduct experiments, make predictions, and watch and learn how images are formed by lenses. The Galileoscope kit is designed to be a full-up light and color experimentation station. The solar shield, used in conjunction with a safe solar filter over the front of your Galileoscope, has two purposes: to enable you to quickly and easily aim at the Sun, and to cast a shadow over the eyepiece (and your head) so that you can look through the telescope without having the bright Sun in your face. What if you don’t have such a tripod? A medium-to-large corrugated cardboard box and small ¼-20 bolt or machine screw will do! The essential function of the box mount is to hold your Galileoscope steady no matter where it’s aimed in the sky. The Galileoscope has a standard ¼-20 nut in the base, so you can attach it to any standard photo tripod. Astronomy is also ideally suited to teaching the scientific process - how observations and evidence lead to sensible explanations about how the world works. For high school it’s the perfect science since it uses biology, chemistry, physics, geology, and environmental science to study the universe and our place in it.

Astronomy is an ideal vehicle to interest kids in science and to teach the basics of chemistry, physics, math, and even biology to elementary and middle-school kids.

Galileo telescope observations