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Sun In A Box
Jul. 4th, 2015 01:09 am... And then today I turned out to be RUNNING a star party!
Space Place got invited to a community festival up near where I live, so I said I'd go. The thing is, they wanted telescopes, and the festival started at six pm, which is a time when you can see exactly one star, and looking at it through a telescope is an eyeball-meltingly bad idea.
Fortunately, there's a way around that--a helioscope! What you do is, you get the secret Mythbuster in your Space Place basement to rig an extremely high-tech piece of equipment known as "a piece of paper taped over the open side of a cardboard box." The Mythbuster then gets a telescope, sticks the eyepiece of it through a hole in the opposite side of the box, and sets the whole thing up on some crazy mount he came up with. Voila--a helioscope!
Now you can point the lens of the telescope at the sun while NEVER EVER looking through the finder scope at the sun. When you get it just right (which is difficult), the image is projected from the eyepiece onto the paper, so that you can look at that safely and see sun spots or eclipses or whatever!
And also you feel really accomplished when you get the damn thing pointed right.
Now you're ready to show it off at a festival, or to your friends who came over for Fringe Night and caught you practicing.
So I went to the festival and showed off the sun for a few hours, explaining to kids how The Sun Is A Mass Of Incandescent Gas, showing them sunspots, and trying to convince them not to try to peer into the lens end of the telescope (which is also difficult). And then I'd have to fuss with the thing again to get it aimed right while kids put their faces against the paper and declared, "I DON'T SEE ANYTHING!" My aunt even came by to see what I was up to, which was rather nice of her, I think.
Then at sundown the festival became Outdoor Movie Night, and one of our telescope nerds showed up with fancier scopes so that people could get a look at planets while E.T. played in the background. I really like being the one to explain astronomy to people, and I got to learn a bit about how telescopes worked. All in all, a pretty good evening.
Except that I got a sunburn. "Bring sunblock," I told myself, and immediately forgot.
Oh, well. At least I didn't melt my eyeballs.
Space Place got invited to a community festival up near where I live, so I said I'd go. The thing is, they wanted telescopes, and the festival started at six pm, which is a time when you can see exactly one star, and looking at it through a telescope is an eyeball-meltingly bad idea.
Fortunately, there's a way around that--a helioscope! What you do is, you get the secret Mythbuster in your Space Place basement to rig an extremely high-tech piece of equipment known as "a piece of paper taped over the open side of a cardboard box." The Mythbuster then gets a telescope, sticks the eyepiece of it through a hole in the opposite side of the box, and sets the whole thing up on some crazy mount he came up with. Voila--a helioscope!
Now you can point the lens of the telescope at the sun while NEVER EVER looking through the finder scope at the sun. When you get it just right (which is difficult), the image is projected from the eyepiece onto the paper, so that you can look at that safely and see sun spots or eclipses or whatever!
And also you feel really accomplished when you get the damn thing pointed right.
I got him! I got God! Right here in the box! pic.twitter.com/CHkRNRo1wh
— Amelia Rose (@AmeliaRoseWrite) July 3, 2015Man, he moves FAST. pic.twitter.com/Q6ATJmcmGc
— Amelia Rose (@AmeliaRoseWrite) July 3, 2015Now you're ready to show it off at a festival, or to your friends who came over for Fringe Night and caught you practicing.
So I went to the festival and showed off the sun for a few hours, explaining to kids how The Sun Is A Mass Of Incandescent Gas, showing them sunspots, and trying to convince them not to try to peer into the lens end of the telescope (which is also difficult). And then I'd have to fuss with the thing again to get it aimed right while kids put their faces against the paper and declared, "I DON'T SEE ANYTHING!" My aunt even came by to see what I was up to, which was rather nice of her, I think.
Then at sundown the festival became Outdoor Movie Night, and one of our telescope nerds showed up with fancier scopes so that people could get a look at planets while E.T. played in the background. I really like being the one to explain astronomy to people, and I got to learn a bit about how telescopes worked. All in all, a pretty good evening.
Except that I got a sunburn. "Bring sunblock," I told myself, and immediately forgot.
Oh, well. At least I didn't melt my eyeballs.
