Date: July 28, 2009
Title: Opening Up the Sky to Kids
Podcaster: Jeff Wood
Organization: http://the-oort-cloud.blogspot.com/
Description: I’m a backyard astronomer, with no training or special knowledge. But I have been successful at getting my kids interested in astronomy, and I’d like to share my methods about explaining the interconnections between the sun, the moon, the planets and how they move across the sky. Also, I’d like to share some tips on what fires their imaginations, and what bores them to tears.
Bio: Jeff Wood is a computer applications training coordinator for Colorado State University Extension. He’s been interested in astronomy since visiting the Adler Planetarium in Chicago when he was 5 years old. You can read more of his writing about astronomy, family and the world around us at The Oort Cloud (http://the-oort-cloud.blogspot.com/).
Today’s sponsor: This episode of “365 Days of Astronomy” is sponsored by Clockwork.
Transcript:
Hi there, my name is Jeff Wood. I’m not a scientist. I’m not an astronomer. I’m a Computer Application Specialist for Colorado State University Extension and I bring absolutely no specialized skills or knowledge to the table here on 365 Days of Astronomy. But I wanted to participate in this project and realize that the only unique thing I have is 1) a deep love of the night sky and 2) two little girls, two daughters who seem to be inheriting that love of the night sky. So I’d like to spend today talking about how to get your kids interested in the night sky.
My first insight here might be a little bit surprising and that is that telescopes are really pretty useless at teaching kids ah more about the night sky. I’ve got an 8 inch Dobsonian telescope which I love, and while my kids think it’s very cool looking and while they love to play with the lenses, it really does very little to pique their interest in the night sky.
I have had quite a bit of luck with the moon. It captivates them for a good ten or fifteen minutes because the moon is big, the moon is bright, the moon is really easy to see through a telescope. But pretty much anything else, Saturn, Jupiter, the Orion Nebula, they’ll pay a lip service, they’ll say it’s cool looking, but after five minutes or so they just want to play with the lenses some more. And you can forget about galaxies or fainter nebulas out there in the sky, they won’t even pretend to find those interesting, they’re simply too hard to see, particularly for a small child.
So you can kinda forget about telescopes. What I found that really fires childrens’ imaginations about the night sky is the night sky itself. In other words, they don’t need a telescope, the night sky itself is enough. What I’ve taken to doing is a couple of times a week just take a few minutes every night about the same time, maybe right after bath time or right before bed time, to just go out side and get a quick update of the night sky, see if Venus is out, is Saturn out, is Jupiter out, what constellation’s out, and just kinda just take a quick tour and see what’s around.
They may not care about being able to look at Venus or Jupiter or Saturn through the lens of a telescope but they absolutely love being able to point them out all on their own at dusk. But more importantly they learn a lot about the basic mechanics of the night sky by going out at about the same time every night and seeing how the planets change position from night to night to night. In addition to the planets and their ever changing positions, constellations are a big hit with our kids too, they get a real sense of accomplishments at being able to point them out. We start out with the big guns like Orion and the Big Dipper and then have since moved on to Cassiopia, to Pegasus to the Little Dipper, and to Scorpio.
Perhaps the most fun we’ve had is an ongoing ritual started by my wife where we drive out to the bluffs of the Arkansas River to look at the rising full moon. It is always a fun guessing game trying to figure out exactly where on the horizon that full moon is going to pop up. It’s also interesting to them and maybe a little magical as well that just as that full moon is rising in front of them the sun is setting right behind them and there they are caught in the midpoint of that event, right at the center of things, as if in entire worlds are hanging in the balance on either side of them, and in a sense, of course, they are.
Later, when you get home, you can take a lamp and a couple of baseballs and explain exactly why, when the full moon is rising, the sun is setting at exactly the same time.
There are a few tech tools that are really good at helping pique your childrens’ interest in the night sky as well. Stellarium is an excellent open source program that allows you to visualize the night sky from any time and any place on earth. Google Earth and Google Sky Making are also excellent tools in helping visualize earth’s place in the cosmos.
Making connections between things is important, too. I still remember the figurative light bulb that turned on behind my eldest daughter’s eyes when she realized that the two dimensional paper map of the world on her wall was representative of the same thing as the globe on my bookshelf and that that globe represented the same thing as the model of the solar system that hung from her ceiling in her bedroom.
Mostly, though, it’s the night sky and being right there under it that continues to hold their interest and I doubt that will ever change. I look forward to teaching them to connect the dots and draw a line between all the visible planets and the sun and the moon, and the line forms the ecliptic, the great plane of our Solar System. Or that the Milky Way that bisects our summer sky is in fact the great plane of our galaxy, the Milky Way. And that right there in the middle of the Milky Way, just off of Sagittarius, is a huge black hole, looming, one millions of times larger than out own sun. But we’ll get to those things in time, and we’ll have fun doing it.
Their sense of wonder when confronting the night sky is a truly miraculous thing to behold, and I consider myself proud and humbled and very, very lucky to be able to witness it.
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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