Telescope Observing

Telescope Observing and Sketching

Materials

1. An Activity Sheet, Clipboard, and Pencil

This sheet for each member of the audience provides space for them to draw their versions of Mars, and for their extraterrestrial creatures. You can devise your own sheet or use ours. We also provide a clipboard with attached pencil for each participant.

2. A Naked-eye Mars Projector

This is needed for the first activity. The starlike image of Mars must be moveable and similar in diameter and hue to the other red stars in the planetarium sky. Many planetarium projectors already include a good Mars projector that can be adjusted by hand. However, if your projector, like ours, produces planets much greater in diameter than the stars, you can use a single slide projector instead for Mars. We use a simple black Kodalith slide with a small orange dot which projects a star similar to the first magnitude stars in the planetarium sky. The single slide projector is moved by hand to produce the two or three relative motions that occur (during the “days”) in the program. You’ll need to make your own “dot” slide.

3. Battery-operated light pointers

These are available from photography stores. It’s good to have at least two of these: one bright and one dim. The easiest way to dim a pointer is to replace one of the batteries with a “dummy” battery consisting of a block of wood, plastic, or metal which has about the same dimensions as a battery, but that provides a short-circuit electrically through the length of the block. With the “dummy” battery installed, the bulb gets current supplied by only one battery, which makes it just the right brightness for pointing out stars and saves battery and bulb life to boot.

It’s also possible to make an inexpensive light pointer out of LED flashlight See the Constellations Tonight News and Updates on the PASS website for details.

4. Reading lights for the students

In our permanent planetarium, we have 7-watt night-light orange bulbs under the cove, with shades so they shine down on the audience. This is very convenient, because visitors can draw on their activity sheets and look back up at the sky easily. The program can also be done by turning up the daylight for people to study their charts, and then turning it down for sky examination. In our portable inflatable planetarium, we use 7-watt night-light orange bulbs in clip-on lamps, mounted to shine down on the audience for reading and drawing.

5. (Optional) An Opaque Projector

This allows participants to have their own drawings projected onto the dome for discussion. We use an inexpensive opaque projector (a “Brumberger #290 Project-0-Scope” or a “Rainbow Crafts M100”), sold in art supply stores. This produces quite an adequate image two feet in diameter in our dome. Better projectors are available at higher cost.

Presenter's Script

Turn up daylight, distribute paper, turn on reading lights full.