Look! Up in the Sky! It's...

Sometimes it's the International Space Station going overhead. There is supposed to be a great sighting opportunity tonight. Check your local info, but here in NY it will be about 8:53 pm, if I remember right. It will be nearly 80 degrees above the horizon at maximum elevation, so it's highly visible. You are looking for a really bright, relatively fast moving dot that does not bink. (Airplanes have blinking marker lights; the ISS glows steadily.)





Sometimes it's just the clouds. We like to look for shapes in them... I have never outgrown this, and I sincerely hope Mikro never does either.











And sometimes, it is an utterly breathtaking sunset. These are not in any way retouched. The sky really was this gorgeous! If you remember to look, you can see beauty even in a supermarket parking lot.

Icarus at the World Science Festival

Brian Greene, one of the founders of the World Science Festival, wrote a story called "Icarus at the Edge of Time", which is a retelling of the Icarus myth, in which Icarus is a boy who travels too close to a black hole to escape the effects of gravitational force on time, and is thrust 10,000 years into the future. In aid of their mission to get kids to engage with science, the WSF made free educator tickets available to teachers and schoolchildren, and homeschoolers! Brian Greene explained the science to the audience before the show. There was also an amazing teacher's guide that explained the science behind the movie, which Mikro and I went through at home in advance.





Our homeschool group participated, and we were lucky enough to see the show, which combines a computer animated film with a live orchestra and narrator. Levar Burton narrated. The setting was the incredible United Palace Theater on 175th Street and Broadway. It is incredibly ornate and dripping with motifs from India. I'm really glad this architectural treasure survived! We had a great time, and lingered after the show to take some photos of the theater after the house lights came up. Mikro and Kev were in the lobby waiting for me to come down from the ladies room when they saw Levar Burton being interviewed by the press. They were standing in the background listening when Levar said to the interviewer that he would rather be talking to "kids like this", and shook Mikro's hand and had a conversation with him about science! My kid has this amazing luck! He made sure to tell Mr. Burton how much he enjoyed Reading Rainbow.

Transit of Venus

Why does this little astronomy geek look so bummed out?



Well, this is what our sky looked like, which means he only got to see the Transit of Venus for a fraction of a second via the pinhole technique before it was blocked by the sky full of clouds...

Space Sightings

One of my husband's best friends (Mikro's godfather) got a new job nearby and took an apartment locally, so we now are lucky to see him more often. Last night, after we all went out for coffee together, we stood outside my house staring up at the amazingly clear post-hurricane sky. There seemed to be many more stars visible than usual. Wonder if that's because there is less light pollution with the lingering power outages? Earlier, from the restaurant parking lot, we had seen the International Space Station arc overhead. Now, we were treated to the sight of several meteors falling. Mikro was thrilled! His first space rock sightings! We also saw Jupiter and Cassiopeia.

Solstice Eclipse

You know you're a homeschooler when your entire family stays up till 317 am to watch the total lunar eclipse on the solstice, and write eclipse poems while standing outside in 20 degree weather...

My artsy through the branches photo may be my favorite... You can just make out a sliver of the moon high above Mikro's head in the next photo. This was the best I could do hand holding my camera and still get both a person and the moon in frame. The large inset of the moon on the photo of Kev was taken with his camera on a tripod...

AMNH Members Holiday Party and Origami Tree

This weekend, we attended the Annual Members' Holiday Party at the American Museum of Natural History, which may just be Mikro Paleo Boy's favorite (indoor) place on the planet...

This year, the focus was on the brain (star of the museum's current special exhibit) and marine life (which makes sense, since the party is held in the Hall of Ocean Life). Mikro saw a real human brain (smaller than you would think, but this is average sized: 3 pounds), put together a model of the brain, and learned about what its various regions do. He was fascinated!



He got to touch baleen, abalone, walrus tusks, whale vertebrae, and a megalodon tooth, and look at various specimens and a dolphin skull model. And study the amazing dioramas around the room.











There was coloring, face painting, balloon sculpture and a station where kids could make star finders. (We later used ours to figure out where the constellation Gemini was, to try to see the Geminid Meteor Shower, but it was too overcast...)





We had a nice surprise and met up with homeschooling friends. Our boys had great fun together, and danced to just about all the songs performed by Danny Grover and Grover's Gang. (Maybe I'll post a video later...)



Afterwards, we saw the amazing origami tree, and succumbed to the lure of the science books in the gift shop... The origami tree was spectacular! Here come a huge number of photos...