Tri-City Astronomy Club
of Southeastern Washington

Tour of the Solar System

These images are meant to be used as a slideshow. I (Dan) just use my favorite image viewer to display them, but you can wrap them into a PowerPoint file if you prefer. That would have the advantage of allowing you to display notes on your device while the images are being projected.

The images are all in a 16x9 format so they fill most computer screens or high-resolution projectors, but they are of two different sizes. Some are 1080 pixels vertically, and others are 720. Make sure your software is set to fill the screen regardless of the image size. There is a screen test image at the beginnig that is in the smaller size, so you can easily check this.

Don't try to do this presentation without going through it on your own or in front of your family first. It should last around 45 minutes. You will need to decide what to say about each photo, and remembering that will probably require making some notes. You may know enough to do this without any research, but it would probably help to do some. There are some things here that I think are not well known. For example: Mercury's "hollows", how we got a photo of Jupiter's pole, and which types of galaxies are the most common.

20 Space Images

You can show these images as a slideshow at an event to generate interest and questions. You can also let the students step through the images. (A wirless presenter works best for this.) You could also use the images if the students are supposed to be collecting points or stamps or something like that: You could ask them to tell you about some number of images or have them come up with a question about one to get their item.

These images are all cropped and sized to 1920×1080, so they fill most computer screens or high-resolution projectors. The file names are intended to be displayed along with the images, so I set up my slideshow program to do that. The order is not just random. I put photos of easily recognizable objects every two or three images so people don't feel lost in space, and displaying it in alphabetical order will make that work correctly.