Award-winning astronomy resource teaches students and educators about stars and galaxies

Award-winning astronomy resource teaches students and educators about stars and galaxies

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey has been awarded a Science Prize for Online Resources in Education (SPORE) from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The honor is given to educational resources that promote a better understanding of the sciences.

The website was created by a team of researchers at Johns Hopkins University, led by astrophysicist Alexander Szalay, and provides information on more than 350 million stars and galaxies. The resource is available to students, teachers and the general public, who are able to pan through the sky and zoom in and out to learn more about different components of the sky.

"The Sloan Digital Sky Survey has made its entire dataset available through this online portal for public use in education," Szalay said. "This is a unique opportunity for students, teachers and the public to learn about astronomy. Basically, anyone with internet access can now interact with the data in the same way that professional scientists do."

The website also provides suggested science projects for middle school, high school and college students, as well as Excel spreadsheet templates to facilitate data analysis. These activities include understanding why stars have different colors, studying the expansion of the universe and classifying stellar spectra.

By Mark Huntsman