International Astronomy Day!

So yesterday I mentioned that I was at the Vanderbilt Museum for an event.  That event was International Astronomy Day, which is celebrated around the world on May 18, and again in the Fall on October 12.  Our club supports this day at the Vanderbilt Planetarium and it is always fun for us to show both children and adults our telescopes and tell them about observing the moon and planets and the night sky.  A mom and dad came by with their two children, and after this boy looked THROUGH the telescope at the eyepiece, he came around to the front and looked inside!  Wait, wrong end of the telescope!  It happened so fast that I nearly missed this!  It cracks me up, but it is also a tribute to the curiosity of children.  There is a mirror in the other end of the telescope which what makes it work, so what the child is doing is actually  pretty reasonable!

Planetarium staff had all kinds of activities for children.  This one involves using markers to add color to drawings of Earth and the sun and planets and galaxies, on a printed sheet that then folds up into a  tiny book!  This is Victoria and she is helping everyone get started making their own books.

This is Charlie, a museum staffer and he is using a flexible piece of black fabric in a circular shape that deforms with weight.  In the center is a small cast iron ball, which represents the gravity of the Sun and he has the children use marbles and they spin them on the fabric and watch their orbits as the marbled descend down into the sun..It is a demonstration of the deformation of gravity in space.

Here is a dad and his young son, and the son is looking through the eyepiece of my home-made telescope.  I printed out a photograph of Saturn, from the Hubble Space Telescope, and taped the print to a wall about fifty feet away, and that's what I pointed the telescope at.  It does not look like it would at night, but the children and adults see that the photograph a long way off, suddenly looks really close through the eyepiece of my telescope.