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August 24, 2008

Making a Planisphere

Filed under: Kids Projects,Science and Art — sarah @ 2:34 pm

A planisphere is a device for working out where the planets and constellations are going to be in the sky and as I was doing the Astronomy badge with my Scouts I felt we should make one. So I printed two circles: one of them has all the constellations that are easily recognisable from the northern hemisphere and the other is slightly bigger and has the months round it.

I printed the two circles onto two different pieces of paper and then got the children to cut around the star circle. The second larger circle with the dates on it needed the middle cut out which was a bit more tricky and we had to help a few of them with it. 

sheets of stars

We then put each of the two pieces of planisphere in a separate laminating pouch each and put them through the laminating machine.

laminating

We then cut out the circles again but not the inside bit of the date circle. We made a hole in the middle of both discs using blue tac and a compass point. In the holes that we made we pushed a split pin through and opened it out at the back. Now we could rotate the discs and we had a working planisphere. 

planisphere

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