What is your local school doing for this year's theme?
Here are some easy ideas that can be run in class:

- Construct a scale model of our solar system and use your school oval to demonstrate the distances between the planets and our Sun.

- Organise a telescope evening at your school. In many average sized schools there are at least a few parents with telescopes that can be counted on. If not, we have our own that we can bring along on an astronomy night. We can combine this with our NSW DET authorised Stars & Planets workshop.

- Construct some constellation viewers and a film canister rocket
 using the instructions on our website

- Donate your computing power to the SETI project. See below...

- Use your school's Lego robotics kits to investigate the use of sensors in robotic probes currently on other planets. Don't have Lego Robots? We do, and they're been newly enhanced to perform data logging functions just like a real space probe. Click here for more information

- Explore the NASA website to find out what current research is being run as well the benefits of this research to the community. You'd be surprised!

- Check out International Year of Astronomy Website to see what else is happening around the world.
 
The SETI at Home project

The SETAlways wanted to participate in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence? How about donating some of your computing power at your school, office or home to the http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/ project!

The project is specifically looking for narrow bandwidth radio signals originating from celestial sources that should not naturally occur. Finding such signals may warrant further investigation into their origin... hey, there could be a slight possibility of it being from an intelligent source!  

So, where could you come in? Join the SETI@home project!

This project was developed by the UC Berkley SETI team to allow Internet-connected computers around the world to help provide computing power in searching through radio transmissions. The way you can participate is by running a free programme that downloads and analyzes small amounts of radio telescope data that would otherwise need a gigantic supercomputer to analyses as a whole.  By providing additional computing power enables searches to cover greater frequency ranges with more sensitivity.

So, how would it affect me if I joined up?

Normally you run a screensaver when you're not at your desk right? Well, the SETI@home project gives you a different screensaver that performs the same function but also downloads and analyses data from the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico. Once the data is analyzed the screensaver uploads the results back to the UC Berkley team. Each data file is only 0.34 megabytes, about the size of a glossy internet picture. Doesn't seem like much, but when you have thousands of computers doing this across the world it all adds up.

The best bit, you dont have to do a thing and you're contributing to scientific knowledge.