1. Introduction and concept explanation
Discussion of our backgrounds and career paths in academia. The students will be encouraged to ask us questions about our lives and experiences becoming astronomers. We give a first broad introduction of the concepts and terminology we will be using for the following sections of the activity.
2. Scientific lecture
We give the students a brief overview of the science concepts that they need for the interactive activity that we will be doing with them. These will be tied to one or more items of the Swedishnational curriculum for the appropriate grade.We engage the students with questions and menti quizzes to stimulate their curiosity.
3. What it is like to be an astronomer (and a few more concepts)
We introduce the students to some of our daily working routine tasks, such as proposing for observational time, reflecting on how telescopes work and what the data that we are collecting are interpreted to deduce knowledge about astronomical objects and the physics that governs them.
4. Interactive activity
The students will help us analyze astronomical data using the tools they learned during our previous sessions. The activities that we propose include creating a coloured image of an astronomical source, calculating the size of an exoplanet relative to Earth and observing remotely with the twin telescopes SALSA located at the Onsala radio observatory. We typically spend around 2 hours on the first 3 parts and another hour on this part. This can be modified as needed for your class!Our activities are, in principle, taught in english, but we can provide slides in swedish for any lecture format presentations and can have swedish speaking astronomers on ‘stand-by’ for assisting with any students who might have a more difficult time with english. We want this activityto be as inclusive as possible, so we can work around language requirements.