ASTRONOMY

Astronomy gifts & toys for children & adults, shop by ex-Hubble staff. Buy solar system models & mobiles, orreries, planetariums, Moon globes, star globes, & star maps. Telescopes can be found under Instruments.

It used to be that most children's imagination would be captivated by the night sky - how many stars are there, how far away are they, could they have inhabited planets? Perhaps they still are captivated, if light pollution and video games haven't gotten in the way.. A popular solar system toy is the Motorised Solar System, which shows the planets orbiting the sun (anti-clockwise from above). For the more advanced astronomer, we recommend the Star Maps from Celestron. Nothing recommends a product better than "we use it ourselves" - and until recently, we had the Giant Solar System Mobile hanging in our living room. We took it down after buying a Wii and hitting it too often...now it's hanging in my office.

Our Large Fergusson's Orrery is a beautifully hand made working representation of the Solar System out to Saturn. It can be run on the electric motor which will reproduce a one year cycle every 5 minutes, or hand cranked. Set in a stained American White Oak case the mechanism is produced in brass and hand assembled in a workshop in Berkshire.

The Copernican Orrery kit assembles to make a working model of the Solar System including Mercury, Venus and the Earth and Moon. It shows the relative movements of the planets around the Sun, and the Moon around the Earth. The Sun contains a light source which can be used to demonstrate how night and day, the phases of the Moon and the seasons are produced.