Here is a short activity which guides you through plotting your own Hertzsprung-Russell diagram with data of the open cluster NGC 957. An extension of this activity can be found in 'Open Clusters' below.

Produce a poster which shows the lifecycle of a star.

In this section you will find interactive Flash animations. You will need Adobe Flash Player 9 to run these animations.

In this activity, the intensity of light from a supernova observed with the Faulkes Telescope, is measured using SalsaJ and plotted in Excel as a function of time to produce a light curve. This activity can be carried out prior to making your own observations of supernova so that you can familiarise yourself with the software and analysis used in measuring supernovae.

This course will guide you through the process of finding variable stars to observe, and measuring their magnitudes over time to plot a lightcurve.

Recent research suggest that more than half the stars we know about exist in multiple star systems, with a large fraction of these being 2 star, or binary systems. These systems are held together by gravity, and are important as their masses can be determined from observations of their orbits. By extrapolating these results, the masses of single stars can then be estimated.

SS433 is a binary star system which consists of a massive, hot star and
a compact object (a small, dense object at the end of a starʼs life,
such as a neutron star or black hole), orbiting around a common centre
of mass. As material falls from the star to the compact object, a disk forms, and jets of material are ejected at 90 degrees to the disc.

In this activity you will calculate the red and blue shifts of these jets and work out how long it takes them to reach the edge of the supernova remnant, W50.

In this project you will be shown how to use Faulkes Telescope data to measure the intensity of light from the stars in a cluster (a process known as photometry), through different filters, and plot the colours of the stars on a 'colour-magnitude diagram' - the equivalent of a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram.

This course contains a number of projects based around massive stars in star clusters.