Texas Travel Study: Mayborn Planetarium

After exchanging emails and texts from Christen Manuel, we agreed to meet today at the Mayborn Planetarium. She is the Education & Outreach Coordinator for the planetarium and I got in touch with her after finding out my best friend is a friend of hers! :) The first thing we did was go to her office and I explained a little of what I was looking for. She spoke highly of three apps that she has on her iPhone and showed me a little how they work. She has gone to a few schools and demonstrated these apps on the few iPads that the school had for classroom use. The apps are free and look like great resources to use when doing a study of planets and the solar system. I have an iPhone, but not an iPad. I'm going to try to figure out how to incorporate these apps into my multimedia project. The names of the apps are Plates, Skyview Free, and NASA APOD. She gave me some handouts that she gives to teachers who bring their students there for field trips. Also, she explained a few examples of lessons that could be brought back to the classroom. Next, she took us on a tour of the facility. There isn't much to it other than the dome, but we did get to see a few neat things. First, in the lobby is the original starball they used in the dome. This is what the use to project the stars onto the dome's ceiling. This particular starball has the capability to project the 700 closest stars. That sounds like a lot of stars!! Then, she took us into the dome where the newer starball resides. This starball will project 1800 of the closest stars onto the dome's ceiling!! Also, it has the ability to take you to any date in the past or in the present and show you what the stars looked like on that night. If you wanted to see the night's stars in Paris, France 10,000 years ago, that's possible!! That's amazing! Christen then took us into the booth where they are able to control the starball and where they sit when doing shows. All of the controls looked complicated to me! After seeing the workings of the dome, we went into the only exhibit room they have. She showed us the Uniview which was set up there. They have another, much larger Uniview in the dome to check out the different planets during some shoes. It looks like a gaming console, but it's there to be able to move around and view the moon, Mars, and the solar system from a bunch of different angles. She said that the Uniview in the dome can view all of the planets, but they limit it to three in the exhibit room to help avoid problems with the system since it can get tricky to navigate. She told me that they have just been given more space so hopefully soon they'll have more exhibits to go along with the visit to the dome. The other exhibit in the room was a rock and bone collection that was on loan from a geology professor from Central Texas College. We moved back into the dome and took a seat for a matinee showing of The Little Star That Could. It was a cute show intended for lower grades about a star being born and looking for some planets so that it could be special. We learned about the different colors of stars. Turns out this star was our sun and then facts about our planets were discussed. I picked up some new facts that I hadn't heard before. There are about 10 different movies, so it's likely when you go back you won't get a repeat performance. I really enjoyed our trip to the planetarium and Christen was so good to us!