Galileo, in 1612, demonstrated that the Sun rotates on its axis with a rotation period of approximately one month. Our star turns in a west-to-east direction, like the orbital motions of the planets. The Sun, however, is a gas and does not have to rotate rigidly, the way a solid body like Earth does. Modern observations show that the Sun’s rotation speed varies according to latitude; that is, it’s different as you go north or south of the Sun’s equator.  Between 1826 and 1850, Heinrich Schwabe, a German pharmacist and amateur astronomer kept daily records of the number of sunspots. What he was looking for was a planet inside the orbit of Mercury, which he hoped to find by observing its dark silhouette as it passed between the Sun and Earth. Unfortunately, he failed to find the hoped-for planet, but his diligence paid off with an even more important discovery: the sunspot cycle. He found that the number of sunspots varied systematically, in cycles about a decade long. In this laboratory, you will engage in tracking the Sun like Galileo and Schwabe during a six-day cycle and then do a simple calculation of the rotational period of our sun.---------------------------------------Distant Nature: Astronomy Exercises 2016 by Stephen Tuttle under license "Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike".

This video segment adapted from NOVA shows how Galileo used his telescope to carefully observe and study sunspots.

This humorous OLogy article introduces kids to the Sun. The big star answers 15 questions, including: Your agent told me that you're the biggest star in the universe. Is that true? I know you star types tend to be touchy about age, but how old are you? Actually, I'm curious to know how stars begin. What's your story? Let's turn to a delicate subject. How do stars die? In Hollywood, I meet a lot of people filled with hot air. What gases are inside you?

2010 marks the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s astonishing sightings of features on the moon, stars, and moons around Jupiter that no one had seen before. Recreate these new ways of seeing and exploring from the materials and techniques Galileo had on hand, while you reflect on the times and works of Galileo. What was it like to improvise new ways of seeing and exploring from the materials and techniques on hand? What do we notice? What surprises us? How can we relate to past experience and ideas? What are we curious to research? How does our experimenting grow into our learning? Let your own curiosity drive your explorations.

The Sunspotters program of the Student Observation Network (SON) is excellent for grades K +12. There are activities for all grades available. You or your students may think of other questions to investigate that can lead to open inquiry by using live and archived data. By collecting and analyzing real-time data from student telescopes, professional observatories, and NASA satellites, they can carry out the same duties as NASA researchers!

In Sunspotters you will learn:

How to instruct students in the construction and use of simple solar telescopes to observe sunspots and to predict which sunspots are most likely to produce solar flares or coronal mass ejections,

How to enable students to obtain and interpret data from ground-based professional observatories,

How to enable students to obtain and interpret data from NASA satellites.