Science Snippets are astronomy activities developed by the Clark Foundation and the students, teachers, and astronomers of Project ASTRO-UTAH.

Scrunch the Earth, Scrunch the Moon

Making models is often an easy yet valuable way to learn about things. This set of web pages helps the user prepare a model of the Earth-Moon system using easily available objects to understand the sizes of the Earth and our Moon, and their distances from each other.

Model Solar System Spreadsheet

Here is a downloadable Microsoft Excel spreadsheet (version 4.0 or higher, PC or Mac) that calculates scale model Solar Systems. Tell the spreadsheet how big you want your scale model Earth to be, and it instantly calculates the scale diameters of the Sun, Moon, and planets, the scale distances of the planets from the Sun, the scale distance of the Moon from Earth, the scale speeds of the planets as they orbit the Sun and the Moon orbiting Earth, the scale speed of light, and the scale distance to our nearest neighboring star, Alpha Centauri.

So You Want To Buy A Telescope...

Good information to know before you purchase a telescope. A 725 kb PDF file that can be viewed in Adobe Acrobat Reader is available for you to read or print.