Author: mayrazamudio

When the Space Shuttle is orbiting the Earth, the astronauts inside experience a condition known as weightlessness. They float around and never need to stand on the floor. Here’s what it looks like. VISUAL 8 (movie): Floating Astronauts Can you tell which way is up and which way is down? [No.] When you’re floating in space, […]

Hand out Space Shuttle models. I’m giving each of you a model of the Space Shuttle to use for the next few minutes.We’re going to learn ways that a shuttle can move. In addition to going from place to place, the shuttle can spin three different ways. Demonstrate each type of spin—pitch, roll, and yaw. […]

One of the best ways to study space is to actually go out into space.In 2021, two companies successfully launch rockets into space. VISUAL 0A (still): VSS Unity Rocket Plane One was the VSS Unity Rocket Plane was made by the company Virgin Galactic and launched from a specially designed 2-bodied airplane. VISUAL 0B (still): Blue Origin […]

Rainbow projector Use a prism or diffraction grating mounted on a light source, such as a flashlight, overhead projector, or slide projector. Quality of spectrum is better with brighter light source and slit shaped source. Easy Alternative: A movie or still image(s) depicting the flashlight/rainbow demonstration (Rainbow.mov). Portable star-planet model Make a portable star-planet model […]

Let’s take a little trip from Earth to the outer reaches of our Universe. We are going to looking back at the Earth all the time so we’ll be traveling backwards. Don’t worry—I’ll make sure we don’t run into anything! DIGITAL EFFECT: Powers of 10 Style If possible on your system, run a “Powers of […]

Optional ControlsDuring the tour, some separate optional digital effects may be useful to give a frame of reference to the audience. Note also that at each stop in the tour, the presenter is encouraged to orbit manually to bring up the best view for the audience. The tour should be set up only to move […]

This program is about how big our Universe is.Before tackling something that big, let’s look at a few things that are a bit smaller and see if we can guess what they are and how big they are. DIGITAL EFFECT: Go to NightFast forward time until about 90 minutes past sunset. For each of images […]

Most things in the sky are very very far away from us.Let me introduce you to this little cardboard person, Elvin. Show the cardboard cutout person. You can make up any names you want. [If you have the other figure hidden:]This person has a little cardboard friend, Sherbin—let me go get Sherbin for you. Will one […]

Have a bottle with tonic water ready.  In a moment, I am going to turn on some special lights that contain blue, violet and ultraviolet light. We will see the blue-violet but we cannot see ultraviolet; we may detect the ultraviolet by looking at certain objects in this room. Besides hydrogen, there are many other […]

When we were looking at the spectrum of white light (the rainbow) we noticed that we cannot see any colors beyond violet or red, but there are actually colors there. Special instruments and special photographic film can detect them. Besides ultraviolet and infrared there are many, many other colors of light. Maybe you have heard […]