Planetarium Shows

We visited both our nearby planetariums (planetaria?) during this unit. My brother Kenneth used to give the planetarium shows at BYU and they were always SO excellent. I could listen to Kenneth talk about the stars forever! I'm sorry to say that the current crop of BYU students hardly lives up to his legacy (the girls were reading their parts from a script the night we went, and not reading very well, either), but it's a fun field trip nonetheless. We'll have to go back again when they're doing a different show (the one we saw was showing us constellations in other cultures, which was somewhat interesting but not very useful for those of us still trying to learn landmarks in OUR night sky!).

A visit to the Eyring Science Center is never a waste of time, though. We always enjoy seeing the pendulum, the wave machine, and the other fun exhibits.

This exhibit showed the density of various materials, culminating with a neutron star. It was so heavy we couldn't even lift it!

Another day, we went to the Clark Planetarium in Salt Lake. They have some really fun free exhibits, though the shows are quite expensive. This time, we went specifically to see an IMAX movie Sam's parents recommended to us, called Hubble 3-D. The astronauts who fixed the Hubble Space Telescope brought an IMAX camera with them, and filmed some really amazing footage. I thought even the parts that showed the astronauts suiting up, getting ready for launch, etc., were really fascinating (because it's 3-D, you feel like you are in the room with them!), but the shots from the astronauts' point of view, looking down at the earth as they floated next to the Hubble and worked on it, are mind-blowing. SO cool. There are a lot of great shots taken by the Hubble itself, also. We really loved the movie and felt like it was worth the (rather pricy) ticket.