Lots of our classes logged on today for a wonderful talk by Danielle Wilcox from the Blackrock Castle Observatory.
Danielle had lots of information for us on telescopes, how they work, the pictures they take and what the ones in BCO look like.
She introduced us to a fabulous website, Stellarium, which shows what stars and planets we can see in the sky each night. (We actually used this in class before when we were looking at Jupiter in September https://junior.renmoreschool.com/watching-jupiter/). Here is the post we shared of us watching the partial solar eclipse in October https://junior.renmoreschool.com/partial-solar-eclipse/
We heard about how red light helps our eyes adjust to night sky viewing. We learned about the planets and the moons and we saw a great photo of the moon taken through Danielle’s telescope. We were especially interested to hear that although it would take us 3 days to travel by spaceship to the moon, it would take between 8-10 months to go to Mars, and maybe 10 years to go to Uranus. We were wondering how long we would have to travel to get to the sun and to Pluto. They are questions for another day!
