This is an online lesson associated with activities during Solar Week, a twice-yearly event in March and October during which classrooms are able to interact with scientists studying the Sun. Outside of Solar Week, information, activities, and... (View More) resources are archived and available online at any time. This is an activity about measurements of solar activity. Learners will observe an image of the Sun and sketch major features, plot data to begin to recognize patterns of solar activity, look for long-term patterns in graphed data, compare X-ray and visible light images of the Sun to find solar features common to both sets of images, and make a prediction of what the Sun will look like in a visible light image after observing an X-ray image taken on the same day. This activity is scheduled to occur during Monday of Solar Week. (View Less)

The 9-session NASA Family Science Night program invites middle school children and their families to discover the wide variety of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics being performed at NASA and in everyday life. Family Science Night... (View More) programs explore various themes on the Sun, the Moon, the Stars, and the Universe through fun, hands-on activities, including at-home experiments. Information about Family Science Night implementation and support resources, including the facilitator's guide, are available by registering on the Family Science Night Facilitators website (see Related & Supplemental Resources for link). (View Less)

This is an activity about using what you can see to identify what you cannot see. Learners will use the criteria they developed in the previous activity in this sequence and analyze whole Sun magnetic map data sets in order to find suspected... (View More) sunspots on the far side of the Sun. This is Activity 7 of the Space Weather Forecast curriculum. (View Less)

This is an activity about space weather. Learners will use the Internet, print, video, CDROM, or other sources of information to research the answers to questions specifically related to solar wind and its impact on Earth. This is Activity 10 of the... (View More) Space Weather Forecast curriculum. (View Less)

This is an activity about the period of the Sun's rotation. Learners will use image of the Sun from the SOHO spacecraft and a transparent latitude/ longitude grid called a Stonyhurst Disk to track the motion of sunspots in terms of degrees of... (View More) longitude. Using this angular motion measurement, learners will then calculate the sunspot’s angular velocity in order to determine the rotation period of the Sun. This activity requires access to the internet to obtain images from the SOHO image archive. This is Activity 4 of the Space Weather Forecast curriculum. (View Less)

This is an activity about the solar activity cycle. Learners will construct a graph to identify a pattern of the number of observed sunspots and the number of coronal mass ejections emitted by the Sun over a fifteen year time span. A graphing... (View More) calculator is recommended, but not required, for this activity. This is the second activity in the Solar Storms and You: Exploring the Wind from the Sun educator guide. (View Less)

This is an activity about the movement of a coronal mass ejection. Learners will plot the path of two coronal mass ejections (CMEs), both the distance traveled and the increasing angular width, as they leave the Sun and travel outward through the... (View More) Solar System. Then, they will sketch the path of the CMEs and identify the location on the Sun from which a CME would need to leave in order for it to hit Earth. This is the first activity in the Solar Storms and You: Exploring the Wind from the Sun educator guide. (View Less)