Planetarium Party and Tours

We enjoyed our working planetarium today. We watched several clips from our planetarium DVD collection, as well as one of the shows in the Planet Earth series. It was GREAT to have a functioning dome!

Tonight, four gentleman will be giving tours of the dome during parent-teacher conferences. On Thursday, five groups from the astronomy class will be giving tours to students from different courses.  They will discuss the process of building the dome, the construction, and show the students a clip from our planetarium movie collection. We also have a visitor from the local paper coming to talk to students and take pictures of the dome. We can't wait to share our accomplishments with the student body and community.

As promised, here are the final pictures!

One of our Planetarium DVDs

Our Go-Vex projection mirror

Projector and mirror during a show

The AMAZING astronomy students who built and constructed the dome.

We've been away enjoying our planetarium

Today, a group of students repositioned rivets in areas that needed tightening. The repositioning did wonders for the inside of the dome. A second group of students worked inside the dome getting all of the projection mechanisms working. They unpacked and set-up the projector, DVD player, and spherical mirror.  They did some troubleshooting in order to get the best projection. They ended up using a desk and box for the projector to sit on, positioned a little lower than the mirror, and an overhead cart for the placement of the mirror. They final got a projection they were happy with and popped in one of the planetarium DVDs we purchased with the grant money. It was one of those moments as a teacher I could see the students felt accomplished. Their eyes were glued to the dome and not a peep was heard from any of them. 

Four of the gentleman who worked incredibly hard on the dome will be giving tours and talking about the process at parent-teacher conferences on Tuesday, Nov. 8th.  Be sure to stop by if you'd like a first-hand look at this magnificent project.

Note: We will post updated pictures on Tuesday!

-Jessica Anderson, teacher