Here is the next video in the Series, “Tonight’s Sky”. These videos do a great job detailing the various events, constellations, and planets you can see in the night sky this month. Take some time on a nice clear night and go outside to see some of God’s wonder! I also added some videos about the space shuttle as we had some questions today about how it worked.
This video shows the last launch of the Space Shuttle!
Cool video about possibly living on the moon!
Welcome back, everyone!
I hope everyone had a great time over the Spring Break. I thought to start off this last sprint to the finish line, I would put a couple of really cool space items on the blog just to make your mind boggle!
First of all, here is a video taken from the satellite, Voyager 1 showing a time lapse of Jupiter. If you watch closely, you can see a couple of the moons float by.
Next, take a close look at this picture.
This image is taken from the Vista telescope in Chile. It shows a very, very, very, very, very, very small part of the night sky (less than 1%). Would you have thought that this one tiny little picture show over
Finally, have fun with this moon lander game! And you land the rocket safely?
As we move into March, I found a really nice video showing some interesting constellations and planets that can be seen. Check it out and then go and see if you can find them yourself! Quite a few of the kids said they had seen Jupiter and Venus last night near to the Moon!
Here is a neat time lapse video taken by the astronauts on the International Space Station. If you look under the video, it will tell you exactly what you are looking at!
Time lapse sequences of photographs taken by the crew of expeditions
28 & 29 onboard the International Space Station from August to October,
2011, who to my knowledge shot these pictures at an altitude of around 350 km.
All credit goes to them.
HD, refurbished, smoothed, retimed, denoised, deflickered, cut, etc.
All in all I tried to keep the looks of the material as original as possible,
avoided adjusting the colors and the like, since in my opinion the original
footage itself already has an almost surreal and aestethical visual nature.
Music: Jan Jelinek | Do Dekor, faitiche back2001
w+p by Jan Jelinek, published by scape Publishing / Universal
http://www.janjelinek.com | http://www.faitiche.de
Image Courtesy of the Image Science & Analysis Laboratory,
NASA Johnson Space Center, The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth
http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov
Editing: Michael König | http://www.koenigm.com
Shooting locations in order of appearance:
1. Aurora Borealis Pass over the United States at Night
2. Aurora Borealis and eastern United States at Night
3. Aurora Australis from Madagascar to southwest of Australia
4. Aurora Australis south of Australia
5. Northwest coast of United States to Central South America at Night
6. Aurora Australis from the Southern to the Northern Pacific Ocean
7. Halfway around the World
8. Night Pass over Central Africa and the Middle East
9. Evening Pass over the Sahara Desert and the Middle East
10. Pass over Canada and Central United States at Night
11. Pass over Southern California to Hudson Bay
12. Islands in the Philippine Sea at Night
13. Pass over Eastern Asia to Philippine Sea and Guam
14. Views of the Mideast at Night
15. Night Pass over Mediterranean Sea
16. Aurora Borealis and the United States at Night
17. Aurora Australis over Indian Ocean
18. Eastern Europe to Southeastern Asia at Night
I recently came across this really cool article from the Mental_Floss Blog, showing the Earth from different places in space. One of the coolest is the last one, which is the most distant picture of our planet ever taken. The series of photos is breathtaking and amazing as it illustrates our small place in this universe.
Here is the article.
n January 2012, the newly launched weather satellite NPP Suomi had gathered enough swaths of data to cover the entire Earth. To commemorate this, the mission team assembled this into a map and projected it over the globe:
NPP’s “Blue Marble,” western hemisphere, data acquired from about 824km altitude
It’s a synthetic view; NPP flies too close to ever see this much of Earth at once. But there are spacecraft that do get that vaunted view—and more besides. Let’s look at the Earth from increasingly more distant viewpoints…
GOES-7 image of Hurricane Andrew making landfall in 1992, from Geosynchronous Orbit, 35,786 km altitude
The original “Blue Marble” photo, taken by Apollo 17 during transearth cruise, 45,000km altitude
Mercury-bound MESSENGER got this during an Earth gravity assist flyby, at a distance of 55,831 km
The most famous of the Earthrise photos: Earth rising over the lunar limb as viewed from Apollo 8, distance of about 384,000 km
The USAF’s Clementine spacecraft looks back from the moon, about 384,000 km away
Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter looks back at Earth from lunar orbit, about 384,000 km away
The NEAR spacecraft, en route to 433 Eros, took this during a flyby of Earth, at a distance of 400,000 km
Taken by Galileo during its first Earth gravity-assist flyby, between 2 and 2.7 million km away
Mariner 10 looks back during departure, at a distance of 2.6 million km; a composite of two images, one of Earth and one of the Moon, moved together to show relative scale
2011 Mars Odyssey looked back at Earth from 3.5 million km, in a view that shows the true size and distance relationship between Earth and Moon
Taken during Galileo’s second Earth gravity-assist flyby, about 6.2 million km away; the Earth and Moon are truly in conjunction
Voyager 1 took this at a distance of 11.66 million km, while departing Earth; it’s the first view showing both Earth and Moon together in a single frame without compositing and without being in orbit around either
The Mars Exploration Rover A, “Spirit,” saw Earth in the predawn sky on Sol 63 of its mission; the first image of Earth from the surface of another planet
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took this from Mars orbit, at a distance of 142 million km
MESSENGER, looking back at Earth from Mercury, at a distance of 183 million km
Also MESSENGER, this is a solar system portrait from Mercury; the Earth image is part of this
Cassini took this from Saturn orbit, at a distance at the time of 1.5 billion km. Look carefully through the rings; there’s a bright star in there. It’s Earth.
Enhanced zoom on the Earth from the previous frame
February 14, 1990, Voyager 1 set a record that still stands for the most distant image of Earth. It is over 6 billion km away. This montage is a solar system family portrait, showing six of the planets. Mercury was too close to the Sun to be visible at this range. They attempted to photograph Mars, but it was too faint for Voyager’s camera.
Enhanced, enlarged view of Earth from the solar system portrait; Carl Sagan called this image the “Pale Blue Dot.” It is the most distant view we’ve ever recorded of ourselves.
Read the full text here: http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/117388#ixzz1mtNPYAxw
–brought to you by mental_floss!
We saw a really cool video in Science today! As you know, we are starting our Space unit and for fun, I had found a really cool video that played the sounds of Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system.
Now, I know what you are saying. You’re shaking your head in sadness, thinking that Poor Mr.H has finally lost his marbles and thinks that we can hear sounds in space, when everyone knows that you can not hear sounds in space. There’s no air and sound needs air to travel through.
Well, dear children and parents, you are right and wrong. While you are right in that there is no sound in space due to the lack of air, the satellite that recorded the sounds from Jupiter actually recorded the electro-magnetic field that was hitting the satellite as it passed by. The scientists then converted those signals to sound. And that is what the video is playing. So you are actually listening to the sound that a planet 100’s of thousands of miles away is making right now!
How cool is that!
So I was sitting on the coach taking a breather from a long day of working and thought to myself, “I need to get more fun stuff on the blog!” So here goes:
Just a reminder that tomorrow is our one year anniversary of Canada winning the gold at the Olympic Men’s Hockey tournament. It was such an exciting day. Remember to wear your Canada, Olympic or hockey gear tomorrow. Here is the magical memory from our friends at Youtube!
So, if you are feeling in the Olympic spirit and want to get into some physical activity but don’t happen to have an Olympic speed skating track in your basement, here is an easy to make ping pong game. Just get a couple of juice containers like in the picture and a wooden stick. Cut some holes through the juice containers (maybe get your parents to help. You don’t want to get an Olympic size injury!) and insert the wooden sticks through the holes. Voila! There is your ping pong game. Now, all you need is some paddles and a ping pong ball. If anyone wants to make one for the class and bring it in to show us, that would be fantastic!
Our dining room table gets used a lot and not just for dining. We eat at our dining room table nightly but after the dishes get cleared, let the ping pong games begin! We turned our dining room table into a ping pong table. You can do it, too, by following these easy steps.
Ping Pong Table: DIY Project Materials Needed
- 2 plastic containers (one for either side of the “net”) that holes can be poked into (I suggest Odwalla juice). Must have lids.
- Pennies, marbles, sand or rocks to weight the plastic containers.
- Wood dowel to make a “net” to reach across your table.
- Screw driver or scissors to poke hole in plastic container.
- 2 ping pong paddles and balls.
First, empty, clean, and dry plastic containers.
Fill bottoms of each container with your material of choice. I used pennies. Put on lid. Consider gluing lids on if you have little ones around.
Cut holes with scissors, screw driver or other tool.
Push wood dowel through holes.
Finally, here is a little learning fun for you. Not related to anything in our science this year, but learning is still fun no matter what it is or where it comes from. And who says we have to learn just what we have been told to learn. So here is a neat video showing the distance our Moon actually is from us.
Did you catch it? There was some stuff about light which is what we are studying now! If you missed it, watch it again. First person to tell me that it takes light one second to get to Moon, gets a prize!
Enjoy and we’ll see you tomorrow!
It has been a fast couple of weeks in Mr. H’s class. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t wonder incredulously where the time has gone. We have been having so much fun and there are so many events crowding the days in May that we may have to do May all over just so we can get everything in! Show of hands . . .?
Anyway, the students have been working very hard on all sorts of projects. In Social, students have been discussing and learning about jobs in the community. You can see a list of the jobs we brainstormed below:
Students are now working on reports on a type of job they are interested in. We used a couple of great kid friendly sites to learn more about specific careers and students are using the information to help them create their reports. We will also be doing Animotos of the jobs they have chosen to present to the class!
Science has been fascinating with lots of experiments happening as we continue with our unit on Properties of Matter. Students have been creating different kinds of solutions and testing to see what kinds of solids will dissolve in water. We have a couple of very interesting experiments happening. One of the experiments looks like it might take longer than I expected as the water does not seem to be evaporating as quickly as I would have like. As a demonstration, to created a solution of water and salt in a bowl, placed a sour cream container on top and wrapped the whole thing with saran-a-wrap. We had been talking about how important it was to take care of our water as part of Earth Day and how places like Saudi Arabia were having trouble with their water supply. It was a great topic because we had just had some visitors to our blog from Saudi Arabia that very morning. I told the students that Saudi Arabia was starting to look at changing salt water from the ocean to regular water for drinking and irrigation. That afternoon, when I did the demonstration, students were able to hypothesize that the salt water would evaporate into the container leaving the salt behind in the bowl. We then connected this to what Saudi Arabia might have to do to get more water! It was a great conversation! We are also creating crystals from sugar water. So two experiments on the go!
We will also be starting another long term project next week. Once again, our class has been sent seeds from the tomatosphere project which is run with the Canadian Space Agency. Classes are sent to packages of seeds; one package which are regular seeds and another package containing seeds that have been in space! We will be testing the seeds to see if being in space will make a difference to how the seeds grow. Problem is . . . we don’t know which are which! When the project is done and our results have been submitted, we will find out which seeds were the space seeds! Here is a video about the project:
For the next couple of weeks, we will not be having spelling tests as I would like to give students time to practice for the Spelling Bee. On May 17th, selected students will be participating in our school’s Spelling Bee. On the prior Friday, we will have our own Spelling Bee in the class to select students to go to the Spelling Bee. We will be selecting 4 students per grade to go. You should have seen a list of words and and letter in your child’s planner to explain the procedures. The words for the spelling bee will be selected from the words on the pages sent home.
Whew! That’s a lot of stuff! I should do this more often!!! 🙂
Finally, yesterday was a very special day especially for Jacob. It was May the 4th; the unofficial Star Wars holiday! (Get it? May the fourth?) Anyway, I found a funny video to help us celebrate even though we are a little late!
What a busy day!!!
Today in science we ended off our look at Oobleck with at look at Mars. Now you may be asking what does Mars have to do with Oobleck? Well, that would be a good question!! We talked about Mars because the scientists who created the Mars Rover had to go through the same process to create the Mars Rover that the students did to create their Oobleck Machines.
In the first part of our Oobleck unit, the students had to think about Oobleck, play with it, explore, discover, experiment, test, observe and use their senses. Scientists had to do the same thing. They had no idea what Mars was like and yet had to use what they had (pictures, etc) to come up with a machine that could withstand anything that might happen.
The scientists held a convention to share their ideas, discuss, argue, put ideas together and listen to each other. The students had to do the same thing to create their rules for Oobleck. Finally, both the scientists and students had to use all their observations and ideas to create and design a machine they thought would be able to function on Mars or Oobleck. We had an amazing time discussing and sharing ideas and pictures.
I also showed the students an awesome video showing the Mars Rover leaving Earth and landing on Mars and all the things the Mars Rover had to do in order to land safely and function properly on Mars once it got there. Here is the video:
Yes, well . . . Apparently, my attempts to try and be more consistent in writing these posts has come to naught. However, I am here with this weeks spelling words, memory verse and various other things. Here is this weeks spelling list: Spelling 0-2
Here is the link for the Spelling City list: 
Our memory verse for this week is very easy. It comes from Psalms and the many of the students already were very familiar with it. However, it is definately a favorite as many students chose it to include in the list of memory verses we collected at the beginning of the year.
Psalm 23
A psalm of David.
1 The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not be in want.2 He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, 3 he restores my soul. He guides me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
Last week’s Science Challenge brought in some fantastic results. We have them hanging from the ceiling if you would like to come in and see them some time. I also created an animoto where you can see them all.
I have also included a new game in the links to the left. The games is called “Stars Over Half Moon Bay”. I am not sure you can call it a game though. Basically, you must select stars and drag them below the horizon. These stars can then be used to create constellations. That’s about it. Not quite as sophisticated as Dyson but it fits very nicely into our Space unit. Students have been learning all about constellations; how to find them and some neat facts about them. However, their final constellation is going to be one that they make up. They create their own constellation, draw it out and create neat facts about how their constellation came to be. Should be interesting.