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LITTLE STARS

This Website is dedicated to the Primary Kids around the Globe and will help them to enjoy Learning by doing .The hard work done by students make us believe that even a complex topic can be understood in a simplified manner .To mark the ocassion of Internatonal Astronomical Year 2009 young budding astronomers have made an endevour to simplify the content retention by activity based approach.Students have conducted research on the topic ,conducted Interviews of the Experts form Universities and Teachers teaching at Chandigarh,Bangalore and Japalpur.Our sincere thaanks to a pet Labra SULTAN who helped our teacher to devote more time towards this website by not bothering her.We express our gratitude and sincere thanks to our Teacher for all the technical assistantance and guidance without which we could not think of working.

See the video made by students about the Zodiac signs

Students used Windows Movie Maker Tool to make this video.

Constellations

Constellations and Zodiac signs are always a source of curosity of people of all age groups. Long back farmers discovered the constellations and related to the crop grown in a particular hemispheres. In olden days these become navigation tool and to know the change of the seasons.

They are the group of stars that make an imaginary figure in the sky and are named after mythological characters and imaginary pictures.A celestial sphere is divided into 88 constellations.

The Ursa Major

The most commonly found constellation is Big Dipper also known as Ursa major ,Great Bear.It resembles a big ladle .It is also use to guide other stars in the Northen Hemisphere.Polaris the North Star is found by drawing the imaginary line between the two stars at the end of the bowl which are called Pointer Stars as a line drawn between points to Pole Star.The big dipper is a circumpolar constellation so stay above the horizon all the night as it apperantly rotates around Polaris due to Earth's rotation.

The Ursa Minor

Ursa Minor is constellation in Northern Sky also known as Little Bear.It also has seven close stars.

Activity to find out the lattitude of your place

Find out Cassiopia constellation in the Night Sky.You can identify it by a' W' formation made by five bright stars. Identify the Pole star by drawing the imaginary line between Pole star and the 2nd star of cassiopia . If it forms a angle of 30 degree,then the place for example Kurukshetra,India is located at 30 degree Latitude.

Zodiac signs

Zodiac signs are the annual cycle of 12 signs along the ecliptic path,the apperant path of the sun crosses the heaven throughconstellations that divides the ecliptic in 12 zones of celestial longitude.

See the video by students to know about zodiac signs.

Citations--

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dipper

The information was gathered by trip made by children to Planetarium in at Bangalore and Jabalpur and Kurukshetra

The material used to make models were used form waste available in Schools

Farmers invented constellations for most of the crop they plant in spring and harvest in the fall.The different constellations are visible in the different part of the year.Hence they used constellations to tell what monthe is running. For example Scorpius is only visible in Northern Hemisphere in the summer evening.