Astronomy and Pizza!

On Saturday night we hosted an "Astronomy and Pizza" event for families in the local community. Despite the rainy weather, we had a great turnout, and the event went really well.

We started the evening by having everyone make their own pizzas. We had lots of toppings to pick from, and I don't think that we had any two pizzas topped the same way!

While the pizzas were cooking, we headed outside to talk about our solar system. We were making a scale model of the solar system, starting with an 8-inch diameter plastic pumpkin as the sun. We talked about how big the planets would be in relation to that size sun (the Earth would be about the size of a peppercorn), then spaced out lanterns to show how far each of the planets would be for the sun. This was quite a hike, since each step represented 3,600,000 miles. (We were really tired by the end of it.) The vast distances in space can be somewhat hard to comprehend, but this activity helps you see it a little bit better. To help give you some perspective: using this scale model, if we were going to place the next closest star to us (Proxima Centauri) in the model, we've have to travel all the way to somewhere south of Philadelphia.

After our trek across the solar system, we headed inside for dinner. The pizza was great! I think that most of the people at the event could get a second job as a pizza chef if they wanted to.

Since it was raining, we weren't able to go outside to look at stars, so we set up our constellation projector on the ceiling of the dining room and did a little indoor star gazing. Liz told the stories that various cultures have made up for the constellations over the ages, helping us understand how people in the past made sense of what they saw in the sky before they had the technology to help them learn about it scientifically.

There are still quite a few community events to go on the schedule this fall, so we hope to see you there. Some of the ones that I, in particular, am looking forward to are the Wildlife Tracking Hike on October 17th and our Underground Railroad simulation on November 6th. And our Haunted Homestead program (October 23 and 24) at the 1812 Homestead is always a lot of fun! You can find more information on these events, plus all the other great ones we have planned, here.

We hope to see you at an event soon!