This should have been a big success...

Jr. scientist E is obsessed with the moon. Every time my computer is out she asks to look at the pictures of the moon in our telescope gallery and she loves looking at the moon whenever it's out. So I've been excitedly waiting for the moon to be visible at a time when she'd be awake so we could look at it through the telescope. Tonight was finally the night. I set up the telescope, attached the camera so she could look at the camera screen instead of the much-more-difficult eye lens, and waited for the excitement. She was completely uninterested. I guess for a two-year-old the concept of looking down at a screen to see something up in the sky didn't make sense.

First planet sighting

We caught our first look at a planet through our telescope tonight. We were able to see Jupiter, along with it's moons (the picture doesn't do it justice). We weren't even sure it was a planet at first (and we didn't know which planet until we got home and looked it up - yes, we're very amateur astronomers). We noticed a big bright thing in a part of the sky where there should have been nothing bright, according to our star wheel. At first we thought it was an airplane, like all those bright "stars" we see that flash red and blue, but through the telescope it was clearly a beautifully round planet, surrounded by a diagonal line of moons (o.k., we didn't figure out that those were moons until we looked up pictures of Jupiter). It was a very exciting night.

Stargazing

Since about the only thing in the sky that I can name is the moon, I decided to try to learn how to identify the various celestial objects. I found a great site for a print-at-home star wheel that shows the positions of the stars at different months and times of night and went out for a stargazing walk with Jr. Scientist A. After explaining to him what the star wheel did, he started pointing to every star he saw asking me what it was called. He's always been interested in outer space, but this was a level of enthusiasm that I rarely see. Although I'm sure my star and constellation naming was less than completely accurate (I'm pretty sure I labeled a few airplanes as stars), both Jr. Scientist A and I had a great time.

Homemade compass

We decided to build our own compass to help orient us for our stargazing. We magnetized a paperclip using our dangerously powerful- magnet (rubbing the paperclip across the magnet many times). We filled a container with water and put our now magnetized paperclip on a piece of cork in the water. The paperclip and cork slowly rotated until it was oriented north-south. We spun the cork around multiple times and it kept re-orienting itself. Pretty cool to see this invisible force at work (although next time I'll use a round piece of cork so it doesn't get stuck on the edge of the container without being able to turn). Jr. Scientist A liked the experiment, but I have a sense that the underlying concept of the earth having a magnetic field was a little too advanced.

Why does yeast make dough rise

Jr. scientist A often asks why we add different ingredients when we cook and one of the common ingredients we use (since we make a lot of pizzas) is yeast. I decided a while back to try to give a better answer than my standard, "yeast makes dough get bigger" response. I knew that there was carbon dioxide being released that formed little pockets in the dough, thus expanding it, so I thought we could do an experiment where we use yeast to blow up a balloon. Originally I put some yeast and water in a bottle and covered the mouth with a balloon. We checked on our experiment the next morning to find a still deflated balloon. I tabled the experiment for a while and was poking around online and found I was missing a key ingredient - sugar. We re-did the experiment with two bottles. The smaller bottle had yeast and water and the bigger one had yeast, water, and sugar. By the next morning the bottle with sugar had a nicely bulbous balloon sitting on top of it. Thanks to some laziness, we discovered that the bottle without sugar did eventually make enough carbon dioxide to partially inflate the balloon, but it took a few days to happen.

Levitating ball

This is one of those experiments that I've seen in a number of books and kept passing up because it seemed like one of those experiments that looks like they should work but never do. The idea is that you use a hairdryer to "float" a light ball in the air. It works using Bernoulli's principle (the same principle behind airplane flight) - the fast air moving around the ball creates an area of low pressure, effectively acting to hold the ball in a tunnel. We were flipping through one of our books and Jr. scientist A found that experiment and asked to do it. I reluctantly got out the hairdryer, pointed it up and placed it on cool air, and gently placed the ball in the air stream. I was more than a little surprised to see the ball just float there on a cushion of air. Then Jr. scientist E did the next logical experiment - she nudged the ball. It moved a little and then moved back on its own to the center of the air stream like it was attached to a spring. That really got her excited. We all had a lot of fun with this experiment.

New telescope toys

We got some new equipment for the lab telescope - a moon filter to increase clarity and a camera mount to help us take pictures. We're still learning to use the camera mount, but jr. scientist A is having fun taking pictures and movies of the moon.