Planet Hunt
Notes for Teachers
Although there will be extensive notes to guide your students through the experiment, there are a number of things that you may need to consider.
Timescales
Due to the orbit of the Earth and that of the candidate exoplanets, there are a limited number of dates when planetary transits can be observed. The first opportunity for phunt001 will be during October and November 2006. At this point we will aim to obtain observations taken at regular intervals during all or part of the 3 hour period during which the transit is predicted to take place.
Age-groups and working methods:
Because this sort of project falls largely "outside the curriculum" we have designed the project to be suitable for individual students working without direct teacher support (mainly for KS5 or able KS4).
This makes is ideal for Gifted and Talented programmes, Astronomy or Science Clubs and even individual keen students.
If you decide to do this as a classroom activity, with support from yourself or another teacher, you will probably find that one or more of the preparatory steps can be missed out - we have decided to err on the side of caution and make sure all the skills required are covered by examples and practice exercises. We recommend that you work through the project yourself in advance and analyse at least one observation.
You may wish to run this project as a self-contained 1 hour workshop where students are given individual images to analyse and the results are collated by the workshop leader using a spreadsheet programme such as EXCEL. If this is the case then you may find the following resources useful.
- Exoplanet Introduction - a PowerPoint introduction to exoplanets.
- Teacher Notes - detailed teacher instructions in Word format.
- Student Notes - printable notes (Word format) for student workshops.
- Results Tables - for students to write their results during workshop.
Downloading the software
We have now secured a number of LT images of phunt001, which are now available for download, although you will your usernames and passwords to access them. If you are not yet registered with the National Schools' Observatory, you will be unable to take part in this project.
Once you have registered, we will send you two usernames and passwords - one for you and one for your students. You can then use the "Teacher" username and password to download the software LTImage software, which you will need to analyse the images.
Should you wish to let your students work from home, you may give them the student username and password as well. However, please note that if anyone has any problems, we will have to send emails to the contact teacher email account!
You should then install the software on your school system (instructions are given).
Any questions?:
If you have any questions or comments, please contact us on ulab@schoolsobservatory.org.uk
