01
Earth & Moon
Phases, tides and the neighbour that shapes our nights.
Image: NASA · Apollo 8 crew, Earthrise
Solarterium for learning
Explore your celestial neighborhood.
Don’t just show students a diagram. Let them explore.
An emerging direction
Built for curious minds.
Solarterium has real potential as a way to learn astronomy: moving from Earth and the Moon out to the planets, the stars and the galaxies beyond, at a pace set by the explorer.
Solarterium is not deployed in classrooms today. Education is a direction we are developing, and this page describes that vision rather than an available school product.
Explore, don’t just observe
Students look around and choose where to go next, instead of watching a diagram from a desk.
Scale you can feel
Distances and sizes that are hard to picture on paper, experienced as journeys through space.
Wonder, taken seriously
Premium, realistic presentation. Young explorers, not a toy.
Students exploring
Potential learning journeys
From the Moon outward.
02
The Solar System
Eight planets, one star, and the distances between them.
Image: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute · Cassini, PIA06193
03
Meet the Planets
Rocky worlds, gas giants and ice giants, side by side.
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech · Voyager 2 · composite, sizes to scale
04
Our Sun
The star at the centre of everything we know.
Image: NASA/SDO and the AIA science team · 304 Å extreme ultraviolet
05
Stars & Constellations
Patterns in the sky, and the stars behind the stories.
06
The Milky Way
Understanding the galaxy we live inside.
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/CXC/STScI · Galactic centre, Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra
07
Our Galactic Neighborhood
Andromeda and the galaxies nearest to ours.
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech · GALEX ultraviolet view of Andromeda
08
The Scale of the Universe
From a classroom to the deep universe, one step at a time.
Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI · Webb’s First Deep Field
Journey concepts · in development
The scale of things.
The kind of comparison students could explore as a journey instead of a chart.
- Moon: 3,474 km across
- Mercury: 4,879 km across
- Mars: 6,779 km across
- Venus: 12,104 km across
- Earth: 12,742 km across
- Neptune: 49,244 km across
- Uranus: 50,724 km across
- Saturn: 116,460 km across
- Jupiter: 139,820 km across
Looking ahead
Teacher-guided journeys.
A future possibility we are exploring: a teacher leading a class through the same celestial journey, and lessons designed around guided exploration.
Synchronised lessons and multi-headset classroom sessions do not exist today. They are ideas under consideration, not features.
Solarterium for Education
Educators, schools, museums and science centres interested in where Solarterium is heading are welcome to get in touch. There is nothing to purchase yet, and we won’t pretend otherwise.