Tuesdays are for learning: A trip to the observatory
- Cheryl Madliger
- Feb 8, 2017
- 2 min read
Tuesday nights are usually pretty low-key. There are cheap movies to be seen, sure, but in general not much is going on. Last night, however, a group of my coworkers from MEC were headed to the Hume Cronyn Observatory on campus at Western. I was looking forward to going to bed early, but I stayed up late instead--in the name of learning! I invited a friend, Alex, who has her own sweet teaching website and blog, to nerd out with me.
I've been meaning to go to a public night at the observatory for a while, and I wasn't let down. The evening started with a presentation about the search for life in outer space. I learned a few interesting tidbits about the search and I got to see someone super passionate about astronomy talk about it! We split into two groups after the talk to visit the basement of the observatory, where we saw a neat demo that demonstrated how the Kepler space telescope discovers bodies in outer space. The set-up was pretty impressive, with a light sensor hooked up to a computer running a code in python that graphed the results in live time. All of this was very impressive to someone who is relatively new to the world of coding, but excited about STEM education. Our next destination was to look at the telescope. It was cloudy, so I say look "at" and not through, but that's okay! We did take a look through some of the smaller telescopes, just at things on campus but still cool. I hadn't stopped to think about the differences and similarities between telescopes and microscopes, but made some connections as we learned about how astronomers use telescopes. I asked a lot of questions. With one of the telescopes, we could see into the rec centre--I could even see the ticker tape running on the newscast on one of the TVs! I had an aha moment when we saw two clocks side-by-side, one measuring sidereal time, a concept I think I might have missed back in my learnings about space. We walked on the moon (rock), and we held a specimen from space. It was heavy, and I learned about how we know where it came from--the ratios of elements, of course! Learning!
All in all, the night made me realize just how fascinating space is. I hope that as a teacher, I can invite some of that fascination in my future students. I am also so grateful to work with a group of people who are eager to learn. And I learned that even Tuesday nights can be filled with interesting things to do and learn, if you're willing to give up a little sleep and ask a few questions.
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