February 18, 2009 Wednesday Night at the Valley- Exoplanet Mission

February 18, 2008
Well another cloudy cold night at the Valley and it seems like Fall was the last time we had the scopes outside and no opportunity to even see comet Lulin with the bino's. Unfortunately Justin was not able to be here tonight. Not much astronomy took place tonight but we all did have fun disassembling an old printer of mine for parts that we will use to build our spacecraft that is on a mission to visit and study a distant star with an associated exoplanet system. We all were quite surprised as to the amount of parts in a relatively small inexpensive printer.
We're going to narrow our search by first researching our potential destination on the NASA website "Planet Quest-Exoplanet Exploration" http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/atlas/atlas_index.cfm.
Hopefully enough parts to get us to epsilon eridani/epsilon eridani b- a meager 10.4 ly away.

January 26, 2009

We we're lucky to get our mosaic of our "Paper Moon" project published on the Lunar Photo of the Day (LPOD- http://lpod.wikispaces.com/January+26%2C+2009 )

Justin and Ian did a fantastic job with our lunar paper mache model of the craters in the region of Ptolemaeus, Alphonsus and Arzachel. We will be using these same techniques for our lunar globes that we started about 2-3 weeks ago. Malena and I had fun too and we were quite pleased it appeared on the LPOD. Bill Rogers stopped during our session and loved the project. The kids liked how the angle of the flash from the camera enhanced the detail of the craters.