Around the Web in a Dozen Links

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Welcome to January’s trip around the web and the universe!

Winter is a wonderful time to do a little stargazing with children because the sky is dark even before bedtime.

Meteor shower viewing has been frustrating for the past several months because we have had a full moon to contend with for all the major showers. The Quatranids, however, will peak the night of January 3-4 during the first quarter moon. NASA put together a nice vodcast for last year’s show which is still accurate, excepting the dates. This shower will peak between one and two in the morning and will be viewed best in the Eastern United States and Western Europe, but there should still be something to see in different areas and at earlier hours.

The Quatranids are known alternately as the least known of the major showers or the best of the minor showers, with peak activity yielding as many as one meteorite per minute. Meteor showers are named for the constellation from which they appear to originate. The Quatranids were named for the Quadrans Muralis, one of many constellations invented in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It never caught on, however, and is no longer a recognized constellation. The radiant of this meteor shower thus occurs in the more anciently recognized constellation Boötes.

While you are setting up for some meteorite shower viewing, why not collect some space dust as well? Whether rain or snow, the leftover dust will eventually be washed out of the atmosphere with precipitation and may be collected and viewed under a microscope.

If you want to pull together a more formal lesson, one of the best sources I have found for science videos and lesson plans has been vital, a resource put together for New York State Educators, but has been made available to anyone. You will need to register, but can register as a homeschool. They currently have over a 1,000 science resources, largely taken from public television programming, and are expanding to include other subject areas as well.

In our home, education could not happen without paper plates. Versatile and cheap, they provide the materials for a number of projects, and thus I was very excited to find the Paper Plate Education site which, as their tagline suggests, delivers the universe on a paper plate. Bookmark the site and come back for simple projects for use throughout any astronomy unit!

For a desk-top planetarium which will help you find objects in the night sky, or give your younger children a taste of the night sky before bedtime, download Stellarium, a free open source planetarium for your computer.

To find out what is going on in the night sky, try HubbleSite’s Tonight’s Sky, a brief monthly movie presenting the highlights of the night sky.

Stardate, the popular radio broadcast of the McDonald Observatory, also has a website where you can receive daily stargazing tips, listen to broadcasts and find lesson plans.

Northwest Creation Network also has a collection of resources for creation perspectives in astronomy.

While you are spending all this time peering deep into our galaxy and beyond, a few resources for studying our own solar system are in order. Because the sun is the center of our Solar System, it is a good starting point for any study. And what more delicious way to study the sun than making edible models? Solar System Trading Cards is a nice lesson, with a large collection of links for additional information as well as printable color trading cards of objects in our solar system.

Dana Hanley is a fourth year homeschooling mom to three girls and a boy. In her column, she will be taking a look at homeschoolers who have affected the news and news that affects homeschoolers. Dana is the host of Home School Talk, a weekly one hour broadcast focused on homeschool news and opinion. Visit her blog, Principled Discovery.