Aimed at pupils aged 11-14 this workshop encourages pupils to ‘blink’ between several images, taken by the Liverpool Telescope, in a bid to find asteroids. The activity can then be extended to them using the LT Image software functionality to calculate the speed of the asteroids, or simply a discussion on what asteroids are and how we track them.
Imagine that you have a type of star that is easy to recognise and is always exactly the same. In other words, if you were to put two of these stars side-by-side, it would be very hard to tell them apart.
Parallax is one of the most important distance measurement methods used by astronomers. It can only be used for nearby stars, but it is very accurate.
Measuring distances in astronomy is very important for many reasons. If we know the distance to an object we can learn more about:
It is the distance that light travels in one year.
