Busy Skies

What a hectic day! Almost immediately after I arrived at the museum, a load of large school groups (mostly sixth through eighth graders) began to come in, ready for their end-of-year field trips. For each group, we ran basically the same thing: a planetarium show first (“The Life and Death of Stars” for the first group, then myths and legends in the stars for the next two groups), followed by a trip to the observatory to look at the sun through the big telescope. As you can imagine, doing three of these programs back-to-back got pretty boring – there’s only so many times you can hear the story of Perseus and Andromeda. Furthermore, the second two groups were extraordinarily large and rather ill-behaved, being loud and disorganized. The experience was useful, however, in giving me experience with shepherding large groups as well as maintaining order during a presentation. (Personally, I have a tendency to get rather annoyed with people who won’t sit still and shut up, but witnessing Clyde (one of my supervisors) handle the crowd calmly was educational.) All in all, the morning wore me out with walking back and forth across the museum and guiding tours.

Perhaps the most fun part of the day came at the end, just as I was about to leave. As it turns out, the planetarium has hundreds, if not thousands, of slides, the kind used in carousel slide projectors (see example). Most of these images, although beautiful and unique, are not digitized, forcing the astronomy staff (i.e., student volunteers) to go through the slides one by one, picking out the ones we want to save for further use. (The rest, along with the slide projectors, will probably be donated to a school somewhere with limited educational supplies.) Thus, for the last fifteen minutes of the day, I helped sort some of these slides, marveling at the really cool images the museum has of the planets, nebulae, and other celestial bodies.