FYOS Event #3
Yay last event!
So tonight I went to the Astronomy Observatory Open house at the Physics building from 7 - 9. It was actually pretty cool, even though it was mostly just waiting in lines. They are two different sized telescopes. The 24 in one was set to look at Jupiter. If you look at the sky right now, you can actually see Jupiter - it looks like a really bright star. But with the telescope you could see some details, and that was really cool. Three of it’s satellites were visible - Io, Europa, and Callisto. You could also see the two equatorial bands encircling the planet, which looked pretty cool.
On the roof they had 10 in telescopes set up. These telescopes were directed at a constellation. (I can’t remember the next of this constellation because I couldn’t really understand what the guy was saying in the first place.) What I did learn that was really cool was that all constellations start out really small (like this one) because the stars are all born around the same time. Then, over time, the constellation expands and the stars move farther and farther apart until it gets to a certain size and stops. So apparently the big dipper started out as a small group of stars and expanded until it became what we see today. There is no uniform speed at which they expand - it varies. But I just thought that was pretty cool.
