Showing posts with label Astronomy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Astronomy. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Perseid Meteor Shower

Alex and I went to our new lake house on Thursday so we could see the 3 planets which would be near the moon and watch the Perseid Meteor Shower. Well, it was cloudy all day and we were worried we wouldn't see anything. I did catch the sunset from the deck on the roof of our boathouse. But, the clouds persisted and we never saw the moon, the planets, or the meteor shower.


The next night, however, was clear! And we saw a beautiful moon set across the lake. I can't believe I didn't get my camera! And, as we watched, we saw 4 'shooting stars' over a period of about an hour. Alex was thrilled. So was I! And, we weren't even seeing these in the correct location for the Perseid shower.

We also read a book about meteors which taught the difference between meteors, meteorites, and meteoroids. (Do you know the difference?) Unfortunately, it did continually mention "millions of years ago" so I wish I would have grabbed our "Exploring Creation with Astronomy" book instead!

P.S. We had our 'back to school' swimming pool party for our homeschool co-op and two moms mentioned that they check my blog all the time. Thank you for that! And for inspiring me to get back to it. I know I haven't been around much this summer!
Posted by Dana Leeds at 7:49 PM 5 comments
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Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Constellations

For the past few weeks, we've been lightly studying stars & constellations. We've been using the book Find the Constellations by H. A. Rey. This is a great astronomy book and I LOVE how they draw the constellations! They are not your typical drawings - they actually help you "see" the figures. For example, in the photo below you have: the Great Bear, the Virgin, the Whale, and the Twins.
We got the idea of using glow-in-the-dark puff paint from Robin at martinzoo. We have now made 12 constellations like this and, when we take them into a dark room, we can actually identify them! We were even able to identify one of them, Orion, outside the other night at Sea World. (It's just too bright where we live to see much.)
Posted by Dana Leeds at 3:16 PM 2 comments
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Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Model of the Solar System


A few weeks ago when Alexandra's Nana was here, we went outside and modeled the solar system. We had found a model online where you make the planets using peppercorn, acorns, etc. These actually show a pretty good representation of the comparitive size of the planets. It was neat to see both the difference between the Inner & Outer planets, and the difference between the planets and the sun - a basketball!



(Photo above is taken by Alexandra from "Mars." I'm standing by the sun aka basketball)

Then, we went outside and paced off the distance between the planets. This was also a very good model. It was amazing to see how "close" the Inner planets were to each other and to the sun - they were all within about a block. But, then we got to the Outer planets and they were much further apart. In fact, we had about 4 straight blocks before our street dead ends, and we only got through Uranus!
Posted by Dana Leeds at 9:38 PM 0 comments
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Saturday, November 11, 2006

Mercury


Yesterday, we read the chapter about Mercury in Exploring Creation with Astronomy. My friend had just told me that on Wednesday she had been at our Natural Science museum on Wednesday and they had special telescopes and solarspotters set up to view Mercury's transit of the sun. I wish we would have seen it, but didn't know the musuem would be doing that! Anyway, we did get to hear our friends tell us about it, and then we read about it in our book.
For our activity, we demonstrated how craters are made on Mercury using flour and small rocks. Alexandra got covered in flour, but had a lot of fun. We also tried writing in the flour and making imprints in it.
Posted by Dana Leeds at 9:05 AM 0 comments
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Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Magnifying the Sun

We are starting Exploring Creation with Astronomy for another taste of science. (I was a science major & just can't get enough!) I just ordered the book, so we are using the free on-line chapter, Chapter 2 - The Sun, while waiting for it to arrive.

Our first experiment was to go outside with a magnifying glass and make a small circle of light on a leaf to heat it up. The book said this experiment was best done during summer. Well, I didn't have high hopes of anything spectacular happening. I honestly thougth we might see a little bit of browning on the leaf, but that was about all.



Alexandra held the leaf while I carefully aimed the sun with my magnifying glass. I was so surprised when she screamed, dropped the leaf, and jumped up! I thought I must have burned her! But, she had just been startled. The leaf had smoked and there was a hole burnt all the way through!



After I realized my daughter wasn't injured, I decided to have some more fun. :-) I kept burning & burning leaves. (And, I realized how dangerous this could be! Thankfully, my daugther was more scared of it than ready to try it on somebody's skin.) I even started burning pictures.


Alexandra finally got brave enough to see if she could burn a hole in a leaf, and with a little help, she was able to do it on her own. We were both amazed at how powerful the sun is when concentrated like that! And, it's also a good reminder of why you shouldn't look directly at the sun. Your lens in your eye is just like that magnifying glass! And, your retina doesn't have pain receptors and can be damaged and you can be blinded by looking directly at the sun.

We read the book, About Space (We Both Read) by Jana Carson - we're enjoying these books. It wasn't really just about the sun, of course, but I wanted to add it to the blog somewhere as we're starting to study more astronomy.
Posted by Dana Leeds at 8:58 PM 1 comments
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Wednesday, September 06, 2006

The Sun & Shadows (& Golden Orb Spiders)

We started a new class today at an observatory. It is a 9 month astronomy class and today's topic was the sun & shadows. We did several things:
  • We went outside 3 different times to see what was happening our shadows. The children each got a partner to trace their shadow and they were amazed as their shadow moved & shrank. We're going to have to do this same thing for an entire day.
  • We got to look at the sun through both a sunspotter (picture below) where we saw a sun spot and through a large solarscope (housed in the building pictured futher below). I found the solarscope very neat as we saw both the sun spot we'd seen earlier and we could see solar flares (on a tv screen)!!! Very cool!
  • The kids went in a dark room and saw what makes day & night by using a globe and a flashlight.
  • They made a bracelet with some special beads that change color when in UV light. We're going to see what happens on a cloudy day!
  • We also saw LOTS of Golden Orb Spiders. We even saw one feeding! Unfortunately, my photos didn't turn out, but I found the picture above at: http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/6506/1290/320/golden%20orb.png. They were large - some of them almost as large as my hand! The teacher told us that they aren't poisonous, and I hope they're still there in October so I can get a picture.

(This is the sunspotter - you can see what the sun looks like on the white surface. It was surprising how fast it moved & you had to adjust the sunspotter.)


(This is the building that houses the solarscope. The roof of the building opens up just like the large telescopes.)
Some books about the sun we've enjoyed recently:
  • What Makes Day & Night by Branley - has a couple of neat experiments
  • The Sun by Branley
Posted by Dana Leeds at 4:53 PM 0 comments
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Wednesday, August 17, 2005

Space

We have been studying "space" since Alex took a Junior Astronaut camp in late July. Here are some of our favorite books:

"Postcards from Pluto: a Tour of the Solar System" by Loreen Leedy
"The Magic Schol Bus: Lost in the Solar System" by Joanna Cole (movie, also)
"The Case of the Planetarium Puzzle" by Vivain Binamin

On her own, Alex decided to make playdough models of the planets by size. She got the idea from the "Planetarium Puzzle" book. She learned the names of the planets in order during her camp.
She also made lots of other "space crafts" at camp as shown in this picture.




At home, we used a Lite-Brite to make constellations.
Posted by Dana Leeds at 12:21 PM 0 comments
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