Thursday 21 September 2017

Visiting the Stardome Observatory...

Image result for stardomeA couple of days ago, I visited the Auckland Stardome observatory with my daughter's class. It was another interesting day as we viewed the various exhibits and paraphernalia associated with space travel and some of the space journeys that have happened in history.

One of the interesting exhibits for the children were the lego sets that had been built up around the various space travels and I noted how this was far more attention grabbing for them than the actual factual scenes around.

We had a tour guide and he took our group into a room to discuss how earth gets night and day and it was an interesting lesson in listening to the various answers that children would give to him. He also discussed the various orbits of planets and their moons around the sun and our solar system.

Our young tour guide then went about discussing how earth was made through a nebular explosion in which the earth was formed and that we were made from the same thing that stars are made of. What he didn't mention was that it was only a theory, one of many, and it was interesting for when some children called out that God or Jesus made the earth.

We then went into the observatory (round room) lay back on our comfortable seats and looked at some of the 88 constellations that had been "discovered" long ago with the Southern Cross being the smallest.

The most interesting constellation for me was the 13 or so stars that make up "Maui's fish hook" which has been popularized by the "Moana" movie and is said to have been used by the early Polynesian navigators to reach NZ

We then watched a movie of which I must have fallen asleep to because I remember watching the beginning and then waking up to the end. That's what I get for waking up at 5.30am in the mornings. And then off we went back to school on the school bus. All in all a very interesting day and each child got a free ticket to come back with a paying adult. I think I'll come back to learn more about "Maui's fish hook"...

No comments:

Post a Comment