SkyDome users are invited to be part of a growing community of astronomy educators.
We know that teachers' time is precious. We intend to support your use of our product in every way we can.
And we intend to support your growth as an effective astronomy instructor.
To that end, we've created a "starter package" of ready-to-play short lessons suitable for presentation to an astronomy class using the SkyDome.
If you're interested in developing the ability of your students to create their own presentations, continue to this page.
Our YouTube channel with short subject videos with full narration, including scripts and written work for students. (under construction)
Document archive (under construction)
We recommend the VLC media player.
Cross platform and the best we know of for handling all digital movie file types.
Planetarium software choices
We highly recommend STELLARIUM for viewing the night from any date, from any place on Earth. Frequently updated, cross-platform, FREE, and excellent "star-lore" from many world cultures. We strongly encourage teaching students to use Stellarium: it's our favorite way to plan a night sky observing session.
We are partial to WORLDWIDE TELESCOPE (WWT), which will go to any place in the universe, pretty much. You can zoom out from an aerial view of your school to a view of the entire observable universe. It's FREE, but only available for install on Windows. There is a web client version, but it does tend to chew up bandwidth if you've got a lot of students trying to use it. Students can make, export, and share TOURS. The learning curve is steep getting started making tours, and we've got some good materials to help. This is the software we are most familiar with, as the University of Washington uses it in their big, professional planetarium. WWT has nearly 100 single-subject prepacked tours internally, and an active community of tour creators.
Some of our colleagues use CELESTIA, similar to WWT in many ways, also FREE. In some cases Celestia seems to have better imagery for some objects than WWT, and it is fully cross-platform.
Space Engine has recently come our attention, and we know that many content providers like the ASTRUM channel on YouTube use SE to very beautiful, realistic animations with shifting points of view. Creation seems to require some coding. Not free, but not very expensive, either.
