Tools for Looking Up

Compare eyes, telescopes, space telescopes, and probes: what each one let people learn.

Warm-up, learn, try it together, practice, then a quick check. About 15 minutes.

What children learn in Level 9

Welcome to the Star Gazers' Observatory! For thousands of years, people studied the sky with just their eyes. They noticed that a few bright dots, the planets, wander among the stars.
Starting in 1609, Galileo pointed a telescope at the sky. Galileo saw moons going around Jupiter, and craters and mountains on our moon!
Bigger telescopes found two planets too faint to notice without a telescope: Uranus in 1781 and Neptune in 1846.
Then we went to space. Probes like Voyager 2 flew past the giant planets. The Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990, sees from above Earth's blurry air. Rovers test rocks on Mars.
Each new tool changed both how much we know and what kind of information we get: from dots of light, to detailed pictures, to rock samples tested on another planet.

Georgia Standards of Excellence in Science:

S4E1.a — Ask questions to compare and contrast technological advances that have changed the amount and type of information on distant objects in the sky.