5/19/08 How Big Is This Thing Street Astro

I felt like it was time for a shift in my program - so back to the NASA Night Sky Network's tool kits to pull out some new things to inspire and bewilder my visitors with. The size and scale of our universe and it's contents is always a fun thing to do. With the simple materials provided in this kit it is really easy to present this topic with any object within our Solar System as a starting point and work out from there. Saturn is available so we started there after a fun telescope view.

Kyle and Dawn were my first takers on this short excursion across our local universe. Kyle is a teacher and Dawn works at the University. In our lesson we covered planet sizes, light time, scale of the Milky Way and Kyle went away with goodies to share with his students! With other visitors I was able to cover star sizes and distances to other galaxies. Special thanks Kyle and Dawn for being my first victims of this celestial onslaught from the astro guy!