Blog 1 – Reflection on the Workshop

And so begins my blog.  I have been thinking about starting a blog for a long time and since this Fly Me to the Moon course requires a blog, it presented me with the kick start to get it going.  It is a course offered through the College of Charleston that I’m taking to beef up my astronomy knowledge since I’m teaching astronomy in school now (astronomy has long been a hobby of mine so I already know a lot about it but it never hurts to learn more) and I’m slowly but surely closing in on my +30.  I’ve got a few ideas of things to write about but I’ll wait to get into all of that after this course is over. 

The Fly Me to the Moon workshop was a Friday evening/all day Saturday event at the Roper Mountain Science Center in Greenville.  It was a good experience to be exposed to common misconceptions about the Moon and also to get some ideas of how to overcome those misconceptions. 

The very first activity was tossing a Moon model the size of a beach ball around to each person in the workshop and the person who caught it introduced him or herself.  It was a good icebreaker activity but also each person told whether their right thumb landed on lunar maria (dark regions formed by ancient lava flows) or highlands (pretty much anything that is not maria).  The responses were recorded and around one-fifth of the responses were on maria.  Turns out that this was very close to the around 16% of the surface covered by maria. 

I have seen pictures of the far side of the Moon but I never thought much about the fact that it looks radically different than the near side.  The pictures below are good illustrations of this:

The left is the familiar near side while the right is the far side which can only be seen by orbiting satellites since the Moon always presents the same face towards Earth.  As a result of the concentration of maria on the near side, it was assumed and many still believe that the maria cover a significant portion of the Moon’s surface but satellite imagery of the far side dispel that misconception.  If I can find a beach ball Moon model, I will use the same activity on the first day of school next year so I can get to know my students and it will teach them something at the same time.

I felt that I knew more coming in than most other participants in the workshop and I even won a prize for answering the most questions correctly on a pretest.  This is probably due to the fact that astronomy has been a hobby for a long time for me.  I read books, look at websites, and take out my telescope often on clear nights.  Most of the other participants were elementary and middle school teachers so they did not need to know as much about the Moon as I do for my astronomy class. 

All that being said, I still learned a few things and got some ideas.  The aforementioned beach ball activity was a great one that I will use and also I found that I have fell victim to another common misconception.  I have long believed that a blue moon was the second full moon in a month when in fact it is the fourth full moon in one season.  The original misconception was due to an error in an almanac or newspaper back in the 1950s I believe. 

Also, I will be using a new crater activity next year as well.  On the second day of the workshop, we dropped different size marbles into white flour that had a layer of dark cinnamon on top.  These impacts made craters that varied according to projectile size, mass, and angle of impact.  The impacts caused the white flour underneath to be ejected from the crater causing rays in some instances just like the familiar monster crater Tycho on the southern hemisphere of the near side of the Moon.

This activity made a mess (especially when I used the slingshot) but it has so many applications in terms of how craters form, using impacts to gather data on subsurface composition, estimating meteorite size and composition from the crater, estimating age of the surface by looking at number of craters per area, etc.  I think my students would have a great time with it. 

Overall, I enjoyed the workshop.  I got to network with some people and I learned a few things – I wish it would have been a clear night during the workshop so we could have looked through Roper Mountain’s big telescope.  I also received a bunch of posters and activities that I will be using in my astronomy class.  And probably the most useful tool I learned about was Google Moon.  I have known of Google Earth for a long time but I did not know that there was a Moon counterpart.  I am looking forward to learning more about how to use it through the Webquests in this course.