From millimeters to lightyears

Preflight to time travel

This week, we began by using the posters (and lazer mazes, as the kids are calling them) that we made last week to compare the distance, brightness, and size of each star to the others in Orion. We then discussed outliers and tried to determine what makes a "normal" star. We looked for the most exceptional outliers in our data and used this to transition into talking about powers of 10.

We compared 1 mm to 1 cm to 1 dm and so on, until we reached 1 km! We also practiced notating large numbers the way astronomers do. We finished the session learning about the distance known as lightyears.

Next week, we will be time traveling!

'Powers of Ten' short film

Powers of Ten takes us on an adventure in magnitudes. Starting at a picnic by the lakeside in Chicago, this famous film transports us to the outer edges of the universe.  Every ten seconds we view the starting point from ten times farther out until our own galaxy is visible only a s a speck of light among many others.  Returning to Earth with breathtaking speed, we move inward- into the hand of the sleeping picnicker- with ten times more magnification every ten seconds. Our journey ends inside a proton of a carbon atom within a DNA molecule in a white blood cell.  POWERS OF TEN   © 1977 EAMES OFFICE LLC