Solar System

Making a scale model of the solar system is very difficult, as you can see from reading this exercise. I would suggest making the planets to scale, but not the distances between them. To work out the scale you want to use, look at the Build a Solar System website.

You can view an interactive Java applet of the solar system at NASA's Space Academy. Click on the yellow text "More on the Solar System" for a quick tour.

There are some robotic telescopes which allow you to submit proposals for observations. Take a look at the Nassau Station Robotic Telescope and the Bradford Robotic Telescope Observatory. I would say that the first one is a better telescope, but the images will be returned to you in FITS format (Flexible Image Transport System), which requires some processing.

Yes, we have started to discover planets around stars other than our Sun. I think it's a very exciting breakthrough because for the first time we are able to look at more than one example of a solar system. Here's a link to a website about these so-called Exoplanets.

Pluto is a planet rather than a moon, although recently there was some debate as to whether it should be called a planet or a "minor body" because it is so much smaller that all the other planets. The word planet is actually derived from the Greek for wanderer, because the planets were the only heavenly bodies to wander around the night sky relative to the other background stars. The biggest galaxy in terms of size on the sky is the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) which is a nearby large spiral galaxy. It is quite faint, but covers an area of the sky as big as a full moon. The biggest type of galaxy in actual terms are a type called giant elliptical galaxies. They are thought to have formed by swallowing lots of smaller galaxies.

Some of the projects at this site are designed for teachers, but might be appropriate for what you are talking about.

No, neither Mercury or Venus have any moons. For a full list see this question.

Mercury is made of similar material to the Moon, so I suppose it would be a similar colour.

I can't really provide you with much specific information. Try looking at space.com for more general information.

Take a look at this answer to a previously asked question.

The reason that meteorites are important when considering the age of the solar system is that they give us a non-contaminated record of the material out of which the planets of the solar system are made. Radiometric dating can be used to measure their age, and since they have probably been floating around in space for all that time, not melted or squashed during the formation of a planet, the results are likely to be more reliable.

I'm not really thinking about including information about galaxies on these pages yet, I still have a lot of things to add about the solar system first. I am doing a PhD to do with galaxies though, so maybe in the future I could make another site to do with my work.

You might get some good ideas from this page which describes 15 Lesson plans and activities to do with the solar system.

Even the best pictures we currently have of Pluto only give us hints as to what the surface might be like. We don't have any high resolution images of Pluto because it was not visited by the Voyager probes like the other planets in the outer solar system. We have been able to create a rough colour map of the surface by observing a series of eclipses by its moon, Charon, see Views of the Solar System for more details.

Planet Mars contains loads of links and information about Mars and the missions to it.

The Jet Propulsion Lab run this page about Saturn which contains facts and images of the planet and its many strange moons.

Take a look at this previous question for a few links to star maps and constellation pages.