Today is International Astronomy Day. My family and I usually go to the UH Institute for Astronomy near Manoa Library for their open house in April. I really like making the air and soda bottle rockets. It got cancelled this year.
Tonight we started with visiting the Bishop Museum's planetarium to look up information about Hawaii's night sky. The have a neat map of Hawaii's sky that you can download. The site also has a useful video explaining how to use the map.
Next, we went to the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History to watch the video Ms. Carr recommended The Known Universe. It was pretty cool but also kinda of dizzying because of all of the color moving around. It felt like I was in Star Wars traveling through space. I really liked the images.
We saw that the planetarium had a blog so we click around and found a post called Skylight: Looking Back in Time at the Speed of Light. The video was kinda similar to The Known Universe video but it explained more about how long it takes a light that we see in the sky to travel to us. For example, it takes the light from the sun 8.3 minutes to travel to us. They call that distance 8.3 light minutes.
The video also said that the stars that we can see with our own eyes are within 4,500 light years. That means the light has been traveling for 4,500 years to get to us! That's just crazy!
Even though I think that cool, I'd still like to think that the shiny star blinking back at me is my grandpa saying goodnight.
Another magnificent post with a very beautiful and very poetic conclusion. You explained light years very clearly, and my mind is completely blown. I'm also thrilled that you see your grandpa every night :)