What you can do with AstroKids

Four areas, and one database under all of them. Learn how anybody worked it out, build something you can hold, then go outside and look for yourself. That last part is the point; the rest are how you get there.

Space — find a thing, and go to it

Search the list for anything the site knows: a planet, a moon, a comet, a spacecraft, a galaxy. Choose it and the view travels there. Nothing is a still picture — the planets go round the Sun and the moons go round their planets, at whatever speed you pick, from a day a second to one lap of Jupiter in ten.

Zoom out and the solar system becomes the nearby stars, then the Milky Way, then other galaxies. Zoom in on Jupiter and the Great Red Spot is where it really is: the planet turns at its real speed, so the spot comes round when it should. The four big moons keep their own time too.

Each one has a page of its own as well: what it is, how to find it, what you will really see, and how it measures up against things you already know. That is 50 pages, so the model doubles as an encyclopedia you can fly around inside.

Go Looking — forty-seven trips, with Spark and Perl

A fox who wants to touch everything and an owl who knows what it is, at forty-seven places in order out from the Sun. Every one ends with the same question, which is the one this whole site is asking: can we see it from home?

Games — a minute each, and the real answer afterwards

Short games about what is actually up there. Which is hotter, which is bigger, what it takes to see a thing at all. Nothing is scored and nothing is kept — each one tells you what is true once you have committed, which is the part worth having.

Activities — things to do with your hands

Colouring pages for the nights it is cloudy. Observation sheets to print, take outside and fill in. Models to fold and pace out along a street. All of it free, and yours to keep.

Who it is for, and what is underneath

AstroKids is for a child who wants to know what is really up there — from a six-year-old reading it with a grown-up, to a teenager who wants the arithmetic.

The pictures are drawn, not photographed, and that is deliberate: a photograph promises something your telescope will not give you. This site promises what you can go outside and actually find — with a small telescope, with binoculars, or with nothing at all.

Go out and see it yourself!

One open database sits under all of it. From those orbits and positions the Planetarium works out what is worth staying up for on your date, at your place: an eclipse, a conjunction, a moon crossing in front of its planet.

Two honest admissions. The distances are true; the sizes are not, because a world drawn to scale would be a dot too small to see. And the constellations, the Milky Way and the far galaxies are scenery: nice to look at, roughly placed, not to be measured.

Every fact here also carries how anybody found it out: illustrations you can read, the assumptions that matter, the maths, and where it sits in history. Best of all, a nudge to go and try it yourself.

We do not collect any information and we do not use cookies. Save a page while you have signal and it still works with none — on the train, in a field, up a hill.

Dedicated to my daughters Marie, Dora and Zoe — to inspire them.