Royal Observatory Greenwich

The Royal Observatory Greenwich is the home of Greenwich Mean Time and the Prime Meridian of the World. These resources, designed for students aged from seven years up to post-16, contain astronomy based practical activities linked to the curriculum at each key stage.

  • Key stage 2 activities include moons, the Solar System, magnetism, shadows and the spinning Earth.
  • Key stage 3 activities have students plotting constellations, and learning about orbits, seasons and the formation of the solar system.
  • Key stage 4 activities get students to look at different wavelengths, exoplanets, gravity, the history of the universe, the life cycle of stars and Kepler’s Third Law.
  • At Post-16, topics include Doppler shift, nuclear fusion, the evolution of the universe, the Kármán line and the Hubble constant.

Most activities have some ideas and questions for class discussion to be carried out before the activity, and many include high-quality animated videos. Some activities require access to software or an internet connection.

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The Rotational Period of the Sun

This activity, from the Royal Observatory Greenwich, introduces students to ways of combining errors (uncertainties) from two independent measured quantities. Using the equation for Doppler shift, the error in the rotational velocity and time period are calculated....

Plotting the Rotation Curve of M31

In this activity, from the Royal Observatory Greenwich, students use real data, taken from a scientific paper, to plot the rotational curve of M31 (Andromeda), our neighbouring spiral galaxy. They will look at Kepler’s third law to predict the motion of stars around the centre of M31. They will then measure the...

The Age of the Universe

This activity, from the Royal Observatory Greenwich, looks at Hubble’s law, whereby students use real data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to plot a graph from which they can obtain the Hubble constant. Students then look at the possible sources of error in their data and use this to calculate the uncertainty in...

Space rocks

This short video and accompanying worksheet explains where asteroids and meteoroids come from, what they are made from and how they may sometimes fall to Earth. It also looks at how comets are formed and the role they may have played in bringing water to Earth.

This...

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