An astronomy afternoon

Saturday was National Astronomy Day (I happened to hear that on the news that morning), and the planetarium and observatory at CU Boulder offered free family fun all day - kids activities, telescopic viewings, science labs, and such. Brian had to work part of the day, and I've been wanting to take the kids to the planetarium, so the kiddos and I went on an outing. We had a great time; I lost track of how many times Connor exclaimed "awesome!" as we went to a new activity. He was in science heaven, and was over the moon (pun intended) for everything we did and saw. They all loved it, really, and have been playing various forms of space adventures since then.

The planetarium-

One of our favorite things was this Science on a Sphere, which appeared to be a floating sphere that could appear like any of the planets or moons, with some interesting facts. The kids were mesmerized by this (me too!)

The moon
Jupiter

They thought this moon play station - with space shuttles, moon rocks and more - was fabulous-

There were many science rooms we could visit and learn, and grad students were on hand to teach and help. One room had fun experiments with radio waves; another had a heat sensor camera and television, and the kids could draw on themselves with an ice cube, and then with the special camera they could see themselves on TV and everywhere the ice had been was black. Very cool! One of their favorite rooms was the ultraviolet room; they had to wear goggles, and played with glow in the dark markers, fingernail polish (Isabel's highlight of the day!), papers, etc., to see how it looked under the UV lights. They also had sunscreen to play with, to see how it blocks the UV rays. My pictures of course can't show the UV light, so it doesn't look nearly as cool as it did for real.

We were able to look in the massive telescopes; on this one we saw Venus. It was daylight, so the viewing wasn't nearly as good as after dark, but we did see Venus. Lucas looks so small next to this telescope!
On the observation deck we used telescopes to look at the moon. We got a pretty good view of the moon.

The Boulder campus is so beautiful.