Class Preparation:
Discuss what a planetarium is and how it differs from a telescope. Explain that you can use a planetarium during the day.Terms and Concepts to study before bringing your class to the Planetarium
1. The light year
What is a planetarium?
Projector: The Roth Planetarium has a Spitz 373 projector which has a bright xenon bulb inside. The bulb shines though a starsphere which has 1,000 holes drilled in it in the patterns of the constellations that we see in the sky. Brighter stars have larger holes in the starsphere. The Planetarium dome is 14 ft 8 in diameter (5 m).
Dome: The dome of the planetarium represents the sky.
Horizon: The bottom of the dome represents the horizon.
Does it really show us how the universe is?
1. What does the Planetarium tell us about the distance of each star in the sky from us? ______________________
a. Is this correct?
2. Testing understanding: could you visit a planetarium during the day?
Preparing your class for a visit to the Planetarium
Teachers please go over the material below which would be appropriate for your class before you bring your class to the planetarium.
Light year
is the distance that light travels in one year. The speed of light is 186,000 miles/second.How to measure angles. Go over the degree and the fact that there are 360° in a circle.
What holds the universe together?
1. What force holds you to Earth? ___________________ Drop a ball. Why does the ball fall? Does everything fall to the Earth?
2. Why don’t the stars that we see in the sky fall to the Earth?
3. What force holds the Earth to he sun? ____________
4. What force could hold two stars that travel around one another together? _________
Why do stars shine? Why do planets and moons shine? What is he difference between a planet and a star, between a planet and a moon?
Stars - emit their own light because they are hot.
Planets shine by reflected light and circle stars.
Moons circle around planets and shine by reflected light
Galaxy - a large collection of stars.
Preparing your class continued:
Milky Way - galaxy the sun belongs to. The Milky Way galaxy contains 100 million stars. It is 80,000 light years across. The sun travels around the center of the galaxy in 200 million years.
Go over the definition of constellations: A constellation is a pattern of stars in the sky named by ancient astronomers. Preferable have the teacher have the class sketch the Big and Little Dipper, including Polaris in their correct relative position before coming to planetarium.