Totally! My favorite astronomical “wow” with my daughter was when she was 12. She wanted to learn about photography, so I set up a tripod at dusk to teach her about aperture, shutter speed, and motion blur. We also compared shots with a remote shutter so she could see how the slightest camera shake during a long exposure would result in a blurry shot.
We were about to go inside once the stars came out, but instead I thought it would be fun to show her how they looked with a two second exposure. “Wait, why do they look like little commas? Are they moving?” I didn’t say a word. I just looked at her, and then it hit…
😳”No! We’re moving!”🤯
Facts aren’t nearly as interesting without the connection of self-discovery.
She came really close to another mind-blowing fact: if you’re talking about linear motion, there’s no difference at all between “they’re moving” and “we’re moving”. Too bad the apparent motion of the stars is caused by rotation, otherwise it would have been a great lesson to introduce basic relativity concepts.
She understood the curved lines as illustrating the rotation of the Earth. We didn’t get into motion away from the universal center.
She’s much older now. Tyson’s version of Cosmos came out in her teens, so we watched all of those and then went back for the OG Sagan episodes. She’s my favorite nerd.
When I was a kid my parents bought me a book called “practical astronomy with your calculator” that went over all the workings and formulae for calculating eclipses, moon phases, locations of the planets and heaps more. If you want to get into it I highly recommend this book or something similar.
Aside from the fact that anything with mass cannot travel at the speed of light… Lots of fun things happen as you approach the speed of light. There’s an excellent mostly-hard sci fi novel called Tau Zero that explores this concept in depth and, despite being older, is worth the read.
(1) Time dilation (the universe and you have different clocks).
(2) blueshifting of objects in front of you. At 0.95c, basically all visible starlight in front of you has been blueshifted into ionizing radiation. Fun fun.
(3) shape distortion. You become more needle-shaped – getting very long and skinny, as observed by the rest of the universe.
(4) you become a nuke. At .99c if you run into anything, your kinetic energy related explosion would be roughly 6x the Tsar Bomba (largest nuke ever detonated) for each kg of mass. Or, put another way, each kg of your mass would impact with the energy of 3kg of antimatter contacting 3kg of matter. Boom.
Sci fi always overlooks the last one. Near light speed combat is basically firing buckets of sand at planets and blowing them up.
Speaking of sci fi, Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 does a really good job of incorporating the existential dread and lurking horror of weaponized orbital mechanics.
Even more amazing that it was found in the era it was. People were pouring over the skies looking for the next big planet, and instead they found this little guy.
There are still some orbital dynamics suggestions that something large and dark is lurking out there – an ice giant. But it’s still largely conjecture. It’d be interesting to see how they define it should they find something very large (say Neptune mass), but it hasn’t cleared its orbit. Is it a planet or not? :D
Actually 🤓 it was James Cook who found Australia and he didn’t go there by ski but by ship and he didn’t find one little guy but exterminated a whole indigenous population
They only found it because it’s more like a binary dwarf planet system than a planet/moon system, so the telescopes were able to pick up light reflected from both Pluto and Charron, while Pluto alone might have not been bright enough.
Friday was amazing, tonight was a bust (but just looking at stars on their own was pretty cool, so no regrets)… Fingers crossed for tomorrow and Monday!
Where abouts?
Where I’m at - northern Baja - of course there had to be a persistent nighttime marine layer, which only starts to clear once the sun is up.
Agreed. I’m not looking forward to it either. I’ll be at work, most people are probably going to call in, and there will be hours of traffic when get off.
Best chance I’ll ever have personally. Live in the path, work from home, good time. Plan is to just step outside for a bit, look at it (with protection) then back to work.
astronomy
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