 All right, well, welcome to this evening's webinar, featuring activities from one of the NASA Night Sky Networks Outreach Toolkits. In a sense, outreach toolkits come in boxes that usually look like this. I think that a lot of you have probably seen these things. And they contain Ziploc bags through the variety of materials and look like these. And sometimes it's kind of a mystery about exactly what it is that are in these. Your astronomy group may very well make regular use of these, or they're unused on a shelf somewhere. And it's even possible your group may have an entire set of toolkits that no one knows about. And so our goal here is to help you make use of what you already have or what you might have in the future as you log events and add your collection of toolkits. I know that we have a number of these. And so if you don't have this one in your stash and you log enough events, you might want to think about getting this one for your next quarterly, what do we call it, rewards? Yeah, absolutely. If you log two events in a quarter, you get a new toolkit automatically. But you can always request one if you have one in particularly you'd like. Yeah. And research has shown that educators, and all of you are educators, when you engage your membership and the public in your various events, will make better use of resources when they receive some professional development in their use. Well, that's what we're doing here. So this webinar is featuring activities from the OurGalaxy, our universe toolkit. You can also find them on the Night Sky Network website. And I will put the link to that up there. So over the next half hour or so, these are not designed to be nearly as long unless we really end up having a really nice conversation. We'll show you a few of the activities from the toolkit as well as give you a chance to share how you've used the toolkit. And or how you engage your members and or the public in learning more about the scale of the various realms of the universe. During this time, we will have to shift our perspective in order to fit everything into a scale that we can visualize a challenging task for many visitors to events. And we'll chat about that a little bit at the end as well and find out some things that you've done to be able to help people to do that. So I'm going to kind of share my screen here. I can figure out where it is. All right. So what we're doing is we're taking a look at the our galaxy, our universe outreach toolkit. And there's a link that you can get to. I put this in the chat window as well so that you can just directly link it. And so all these resources are also on the Night Sky Network website as well as in the toolkit. And so if you do go to the website, you'll see this at that link. And Vivian did a really nice job of collecting all these and making sure that they're in one place with all of the names so that it's fairly evident what it is that you're looking for. And so this is what you find. And then you can get to each of these activities as well as the full manual that comes with a toolkit that's actually inside the toolkit. So one of the things that I like to do, I don't know what that red mark ended up being. That's kind of a gray mark. And so one of the things that's really kind of fun to think about is if there's kind of a question that you don't know what we're doing, but birdseed. Birdseed is kind of an interesting thing. And so what we want to do is we want to think about how many birdseeds you think there are on this piece of paper. I hope that red thing is throughout this entire, it might be the one we'll have to see. So here we've got a bunch of birdseed. And so in the chat window, just kind of jot down how many birdseed you think there are. Now, if you're doing something like this at one of your outreach events, sometimes they get spilled. And so I actually like these little plastic lids for being able to keep these from the birdseed from spraying too far. OK, so we got some good guesses. We got 250, 150, 100, 279, 90, 135. So we've got kind of a wide range of guesses here. 160. I think some of these people may have done this at 200 or far. I'm sure that they have. Good guesses. 125. So these are some really great guesses on how many that there are. Well, we're not going to tell you how many there are right now, but it looks like we're kind of averaging, what do you think, about 150, 170? 200? Maybe around. So we're averaging that we have a much larger range, of course. But that's always kind of good to give people a sense of what it means to estimate things. And so this kind of goes to this idea that when you look up at the night sky and you say, well, how many stars can we see when we look up at the sky? And contrary to what people say, it's not billions and billions that we can see. It's not millions of stars that we can see when we look up at the night sky. It's actually a fairly limited number, which always surprises people, that it's a very, very small number of stars that you actually see when you look up at the night sky. And so some of you might have a pretty good idea. And so just, again, let's toss it out there on the chat window about how many stars can we see with our unaided eye when we look up at night? 9,000, 6,000, 2,000, 10,000, 3,000, 3,000, thousands. So we're talking about in the range of several thousands. And I think that what they say is that there's about 6,000 stars total that are available to us to see with our unaided eye, which means that you can only see maybe about half of them at any one time. So right around 3,000 to 4,000 stars on any given night that we could look up and count. But it certainly looks like it's a whole lot. So one of the things that we want to think about, boy, that is really obnoxious that that little red thing is just showing up all the time. We're just going to have to deal with that, I think. Yeah, fix it if you want to talk. Go for it. Yeah. So one of the things that we want to think about here is, I'm watching what you're doing. You just keep talking. I wanted my slides, though. OK. Darn it. All right. Darn it. Yes. Thank you. Carry on. OK. So what we want to do is we want to think about what our place is in our galaxy. And so this is one of the core activities in our galaxy, our universe outreach kit. And so we think about where we are in our galaxy. And so what's the difference between where we are and what we're thinking about with the galaxy? What's the difference between all these things? So we've got the solar system. Oh, and this PowerPoint is actually in one of the resources that's in the kit and also on the website. So you can get these slides from there. So what's the difference? And so here we've got our solar system where everything that we know is down there in the middle. We really don't know a whole lot more besides what's out there, besides the little bit that we can see with our telescopes. And then we have the galaxy. And then we can think about the broader universe. And so we kind of have these three realms that we can think about. The solar system or galaxy, then the universe is a whole. But the solar system fits into this small part of the galaxy. And then the galaxy fits into a very small portion of the universe. And so we've got kind of a scale challenge here of being able to move from the everyday things that we experience to these things that are very, very large. To us, the solar system is very, very large. And yet it's a very, very small part of the greater galaxy. So let's think about where our solar system is within our galaxy. So here we've got our galaxy with all the visible stars, gas, dust. And we're located right about there. And so one of the things that we might want to think about is here we've got all the different planets that are in the solar system. We've been to many of them. NASA missions have explored all of them at this point. And which is a pretty remarkable thing that we can say that today that every single one of these objects in, I guess, the traditional solar system have been visited by NASA missions. We have great imagery of all of these. So we have a much better idea of what's going on there. And so if we take this, and if we took our solar system that we're familiar with and shrug it to the size of a quarter, and so we all have a pretty good notion of how big a quarter is, what an inch, inch wide, something like that. Let's see, they can't really see us holding this up. Stop, because they see the slides. So we'll pull that out as a prop. But it's always good when you're engaging people to have a quarter as a prop, just to remind people about how big they are. So we're taking the solar system, it took years to get out to Pluto. And it's taking even more years for the Voyager spacecraft. They've been out there for what, 40 years, or something like that. And they're just one of them's just recently left the solar, so the official edge of the solar system is out into inner solar space. And so if we shrink that down to the size of a quarter, we want to think about how big the Milky Way Galaxy is. And so we've got that quarter. So what do you think? Some of you have done this before. And so what's your recollection, or what's your sense on the scale of our solar system as a quarter, how big would we need to represent the Milky Way Galaxy on that same scale? How big would we need? Melinda knows she's done this a few times. Yeah, I think David's done this too. So North America hosts the coast. So that's a pretty remarkable thing, that on the scale, the Milky Way is the size of the continent. And so basically we're talking 100,000 light years across. And so if we think about that one inch representing five and a half light hours, that's the size of our quarters, Sunday photo. And so now we need to have basically 100,000 inches. And so one mile on this scale would be 40 light years. And so we need 2,500 miles to represent those 100,000 light years. That's really remarkable that we can scale this. And so here we've got the continent of North America. And so that's how big we need to be able to put our galaxy coast to coast. And our solar system is one little quarter where it was located in there before. I think it was right around Reno on this particular map where you could... Well, you can't put quarters into the machines anymore. They, you have to put paper, money or vouchers. So I guess that's not a very good analogy anymore. So we lost them. Oh, we're having fun. So this is a really remarkable thing. So the other thing that we want to consider is how thick our galaxy is. And so it's about 1,000 light years thick. And so on our scale that we were talking about 40 light years to the mile. And so that would mean that we're looking at about 25 miles thick. And so this is a pretty remarkable thing that the galaxy in this scale would be 2,500 miles across 25 miles thick. And so that's where all of the stars are scattered within this 2,500 mile diameter across the continent to a depth of 25 miles. And so here's just another one that thinks about some of the other ways to think about how big 200 billion is. 200 billion is a really big number. That's a huge number. And so how do we make sense of this? And so let's think about this 200 billion quarters or 200 billion of something else. So let's go back to think about the bird seeds. So how many bird seeds did we, what did we say the bird seeds was? Maybe around 200. Right around 200. You know, that was a pretty good guess because I actually counted them. Oh, now we got a little red thing. I don't know where that came from, but oh wow. Magic. There it went away. So we have 214, I actually counted them out. So, you know, we got good guessers here. So where's the jar of jelly beans when you need them? So it's, maybe that's dating ourselves. You go to the corner of the drug store with the jar of jelly beans. Can you guess on the prize? Yeah. So if you think about that, how much bird seed would you need if, you know, there we've got 214? How many bird seeds would you need? Some of you know the answer to this because you've done this, you know, apparently. And so the answer is that we take that football field and you take enough bird seed to fill the football field four feet deep. That's how much bird seed you would need to have 200 billion individual seeds. Four feet deep on a football field. That's a lot of bird seed. And yet, are the stars really close together? And so if you think about it, you know, the stars aren't that close together. And so what do we need to do with our bird seed to truly represent our galaxy? What do we need to do with our bird seed? Skip says we need a lot of birds. Yeah, we need a lot of birds to eat it. So basically what we want to do is we want to spread that football field of bird seed over the continent 25 miles deep. And so this is, and here's another little one, so the hour, and so if you do that, they're not close together anymore. The average distance between stars around the sun is about 6.3 light years. That means that the average distance between the quarters or the average distance between the solar systems. So if you have lots of solar systems in our galaxy with a little bird seed star there in the middle, so the average distance between these solar systems is about 250 meters, or almost the length of the three football field. So if you think of that on the scale of our continent, that's actually fairly close. And yet it's so far away. We just can't go there for the weekend, although we keep watching the movies that tell us that wouldn't it be fun if we could? Can't even go there for a lifetime. I know, I know, it would take a couple of lifetimes just to get there. So this is a really remarkable thing. So space is really, really big and there's a lot of room in between pieces of the bird seed and in between all those nice quarters. And so this is a really fun way to think about the scale of the galaxy and how our solar system fits into that scale. Now, one of the other ways that you can do when you're working with your people that come to your events is that there's a set of these, what do you wanna call them? There's that red thing, keep showing up. And so you get a set of what ends up going on CDs and that this will, actually you can have these available and you can help represent how far away the stars are that you're actually seeing if we use the same scale. And so I'm gonna turn it over to Vivian and I'm guessing you would like me to stop, sure. Yeah, we can hop out of the... And then we'll come back to that in just a little bit. Awesome. So I think you can probably see us now. So these come in a set of, well in the toolkits there, you have to put them on the CDs yourself. But you can also print these online. This is a, one of the CD covers just has an image of a galaxy. One of the common misconceptions here is that this is our galaxy, the Milky Way galaxy. We know this is just a representation because we can't take a picture of our galaxy. Speaking of trying to go for scale, we can't get outside of our galaxy, it's so large. But we're using this galaxy to represent the Milky Way galaxy. And we have a picture of it. You can even just introduce this very quickly at a star party if you're at the telescope and say, so if you could put the solar system in the palm of your hand, say, the Milky Way galaxy would spread across the US. And this is a very simple way. You can even do this in low light. It's designed for use with red light, flash lights. But then what the cool part is, is when you look up and see something, these extra CDs here have the distances to many of the objects that you're looking at, which is people ask that often. People often say, hey, how far away is that? And you could say that's 10 light years. That doesn't mean anything to somebody who's coming up to a telescope for the first time when they're trying to conceive these large distances. But if you already have a scale model that's set up, you can say, I got up really early and saw Orion the other morning. And I was thinking about this activity because one of the CDs has Orion and Taurus on there. And it's got M42 on here. So on the scale of the Milky Way on the North American continent, the M42 is about three quarters of a mile across. So it's big. It's like as big as a neighborhood. And it would be about 40 miles away. So for us, that would be maybe San Jose or something like that. So you can actually use the things in your location to give people ideas of how it would be that nebula that you see in Orion's sword. That would be the size of a neighborhood down in San Jose compared to our little bitty solar system that can be held in the palm of your hand. So that gives people a way to kind of start to imagine these vast, vast differences. So that one's called, what is that activity called? That's the, our place in our galaxy. Yeah, so the first one. Telescopes was prime machines. Oh, that's next. Are they connected? They are, they are, absolutely. So that's a really easy way to do that. You can carry these, they come in, if you get the, you have the toolkit, they come in a really handy slide set that these used to be for the visors of our cars. My car still has CDs, so I still have one of these. So you can carry them around, just throw them in your telescope case. If you want to use that to talk about things. Did you, are you sharing your screen? Okay, sorry, I didn't know. Okay, so then one other way to do that and a way for your visitors to get more pointed with the things that they're looking at through your telescopes is this handy dandy little trifle called passport through time. And it talks about what people are seeing through the telescope and how long it has taken the light to get there and using that as a measure of distance. So it's got the three different realms, the solar system, the Milky, our Milky Way galaxy and then the universe beyond our galaxy. And it talks about moonlight taking just a few seconds to get here and things that you see in our solar system take between seconds to hours. The light from those objects takes seconds to hours to get here. You can also talk about things that you see in the Milky Way and those can take between a few years up to thousands of years to for the light to arrive from that object. So some of these are fun because you can talk about somebody who is, you can use these CDs to talk about somebody who's maybe a few years old, nine years old. Let's see, I just, I had a thought. Oh, I think, oh, the North Star is, the light takes the light about nine years to get here. So if you have a nine year old at your event, that's a really easy way to say, hey, when you were born, the light left that star and now it's gotten here. Correct me if I'm wrong on that nine years old or somebody knows better than I do. I'm pretty sure that's what I remember. So, and then it talks about the galaxies that we can see outside of our Milky Way. And that's pretty much all you can see in our backyard telescopes that's outside of our Milky Way. So you can use this as a game to see if visitors can come up with at least one object in each category. You can see. You know, all we have to do, we actually have the resource right here. Oh, we haven't. The little difference here and Polaris is 11 on our scale, 11 miles away or 431 light years. Oh, much too much farther than that. Nine miles is maybe what I was thinking of the other one. So sorry, yes. You'd have to find something much closer than Polaris than nobody's battle yet. So this is a simple way to have visitors remember what they saw through your telescopes and also just kind of record and talk about the things that they have seen in the telescopes. So it's a nice one to do while you're observing. And we often give away a prize, a sticker or something for those people who have completed the tour. There you go. All right. So there's actually a second set of in here. I'm gonna go back to the screen sharing. Linda mentioned that Sirius is about nine years. Light years away. Thank you so much. That must have been what I was thinking of. Polaris, birth of Galileo. That's cool. Awesome. Oh, it's very cool. Todd, I like that. That's great. Yeah. Okay. So I'm gonna go back to this. Let's see. And I think that we're sharing now. Yeah. And so there's actually another set of CDs in there or another set of stickers that could go on CDs that has to do with this universe of galaxy. And this is one of those times where we're shifting our scale. And so so far we've been fairly consistent with thinking about the solar system as being the size of a quarter, the galaxy being the size of a continent and then thinking about how far you would have to go to get to these stars that we could see in some of the more familiar constellations. And so that's still using that same scale. But when we move out to thinking about the galaxies, we have to shift our scale. And so on this, we're gonna be using something. There's a little bit different set of these CDs and it comes in this. And so you can see all these, if you spread them out, you see that we've got a number of these different galaxies that are at vastly different distances. And so on this, let's see the scale on here is, let's see, what's the overall scale that we've got here? One million light years is four feet. And so on one million light years for every four feet, then what we've done is we've gone through and we've indicated on the back of these. And so basically what we've done is the galaxy is shrunk to the size of the CD. And then on that scale, these would be that far away. And so you would put the Andromeda galaxy eight feet away. And so that would be approximately two million light years and then you'd put these other ones at gradually increasing distances. So we went outside and we kind of showed how this would go. And so here we have one of our coworkers with you are here on the Milky Way. And then what we did was we have two of these, the Andromeda galaxy, then I think it's the pinwheel galaxy that are fairly close to, the pinwheel is not that much further away. And so they'd be about eight feet away. And so you could have people kind of spread themselves out. Then you'd have the next one. And so we actually compressed this from here. We actually ended up didn't go the number of yards. And so Perry here should have been 16 yards away into 16 feet, but I didn't want anyone to disappear too far up the street. And so then we have some additional people holding some additional galaxies. And you start to have a sense of how far away these objects are. And there we have Dave Prosper up there a little ways past the tree. And so this is kind of a fun way to think about that. And then the, I'm sorry that this is so fuzzy. I ended up having to do a screen grab on this. But then some of these objects on here the most distant object that you can see with a backyard telescope on a nice quasar would be about two miles away on this particular scale than the Hubble deep field. The farthest away imagery that we've taken with engineered instruments would be 10 miles away to get to the galaxies in the Hubble deep field. And so those would be, if you have a not just person that you want to help demonstrate the scale you say, yeah, go up there. And so on our scale here, and so back behind you know two miles would be up over a hill and you know, you wouldn't be able to see them but it's kind of fun to think about it. We really wouldn't do that for you. I think that'd be in the reservoir. Yeah, in the reservoir. This PowerPoint that Brian shared is he's made some modifications to it. Please take the PowerPoints that are on the Night Sky Network website modify them for your own use. Do what you will with them so that they work for your voice and for how you want to give presentations. A lot of these are, he added those pictures, for example, of the people on with all of these CDs. But most of this is already up there and there's a script that goes with it. You can use those on the PowerPoint but we encourage you to edit and modify it will. Especially with Gaia just about to release a whole bunch of data. I think it's gonna keep hearing more and more all these distances might be updated soon. Nothing astronomers love to do more than argue about precise distances. Absolutely. So what we'd like to do now is hear from you about how you've used these resources in going about and helping the visitors to your events or to your meetings about the scaling activities. What other activities have you used to kind of supplement these? What are some misconceptions that maybe you've encountered about scaling and what have you done to help dispel some of those or help people have a better understanding? And so at this point, we would love to have people unmute themselves and so that we can actually hear from you. There's a note from Skip. He's used the 3D Orion activity. That's a really fun one. If you have time and people with manual dexterity, that's a fabulous way to show how all the stars are at a different distance from us. I think we also, yeah, we have the Orion here and it will show you that some of them on our scale of the galaxy in North America, some are 20 miles away, while others are only 1.6 miles away. So they're vastly different distances from us, but they appear as constellations from our view. That's a cool one. And we have also used, we paint the beads glow-in-the-dark paint so we can turn off the lights and turn on the UV light and then see how they line up from different views. Very cool. Thanks, Skip. Anybody else have other things that they've done with these activities that they wanna share or hacks that they have come up with, like those? Oh, Ron has one. He says Google Earth has a ruler and you can stretch a line to the right distance on the map and that's nice if they're popular landmarks. Absolutely. I know I was trying to think of what's about 40 miles away from here. It's good to think about before you get started, but Google Earth is a great one as well to say, oh, that's right at the pier or wherever you happen to be. Thanks, Ron. Don't be shy. Go ahead and unmute yourself. We'd love to hear from you. Yes, this is talk radio. Has anybody not tried these and wants to give them a shot? Have you, we'd be happy to give tips for that too if somebody wants to give tips for people trying them for the first time. Oh, Linda's got a good one. We need a foam model of a spiral galaxy with push pins on it to show where the solar system is. Oh, Linda, you don't have that handy. Do you? I'd love to see that. Yeah. Send us a picture if you would. That's very cool. And one other thing, I skip asked about what would the cosmic microwave background be if you wanted to do a demo of that? I think it's just a little hair further away than the Hubble Deep Field CD. So it'd be 10 miles plus a couple feet. It's like, I think the Hubble Deep Field is 13.7 billion light years. And that's pretty close to the CMV. It's like the edge of the observable universe. So maybe 13.8 billion light years. So yeah. That would be fun for somebody to investigate that a little bit and come up with the official numbers. I would love to know. Yeah. Absolutely. I would love to update these with new pictures in color. Ooh. I think that might be on our agenda. Yeah. Well, since somebody else- People indicated that they're just now learning about this and Julie is gonna go on a search mission and see if she can find whether you have it. And if someone- You could also have, I'm sorry. You could also have your club members who are photographers take some pictures of these different galaxies and then use those on the CDs. Nice. Oh yeah. I would say also these are not to scale the size of the actual galaxies. For example, the Andromeda, if we were this big, this is us, the Andromeda would be more than twice as big as we are. So you could use a plate if you wanted to, but these work just fine. You could even do a little competition to see whose picture would end up going on the CD. Mm, nice. Not quite a calendar, but still. And if you, someone has the toolkit or you'd like to just make use of these right now, you can also print all of these online. You just get sticker sheets of paper or it tells you the Avery label number, I believe. And you can make these yourself, no problem. Grace, we'd love it if you're willing to unmute yourself and to share with us audibly. You're talking to me? Yeah. Yes, this is the foam galaxy. Nice. With the sun indicated by a yellow push pin. But after explaining that the galaxy is a hundred times wider than it is thick, this is really not very accurate. So then I tell them that the CD here is actually a closer, more scale representation of our galaxy than is this. But here they get to see the spiral arms. That's great for people who have trouble seeing as well. That's nice to be able to feel a galaxy. Really nice. Grace, are you willing to share out loud? I'm sorry, what was the question? Oh, we're asking to see if Grace is willing to share out loud what her comment. Oh, yeah, you can hear me? Yeah, we can. Yeah, over the summer, we live in an area where we're often clouded out. So we have to come up with alternative exercises or just different things that we can do in lieu of using a telescope, especially because the kids get kind of disappointed when they can't look through a telescope and they're often restless. So that's why I made the comment about doing a planet walk with restless kids because when we work with day camps, they're all full of energy and so it gives them something to do. And what I've done is that I've helped, I've had the kids actually plant stakes. We take giant steps and we count from the sun, we put a stake down. The planets I use are actually scaled to a six inch sun so they're often surprised how small the earth is compared to Jupiter and Saturn. So it's kind of a good experience and we've gone out as far as Saturn because going much further would take us out of the city park. And when we get to Saturn, the kids are always like, they turn around and they go, whoa, we're out this far. And kids are so imaginative that they can kind of, they can kind of go there where adults can't go there yet. And so it's really cool when you see little kids be that surprised, that's all. I came up with an idea as you were talking about that, Grace, and it kind of takes Skip's idea of the 3D constellations. And so if you, and maybe I can say this simply, and so if you had a point and then you, from that point, which would represent where we are here on earth, and maybe send people out with some mini mag lights in candle mode or something and have them go out to a particular distance. You'd have to change the scale a little bit, but have them go to a scale and have them arrange so that from your preferred earth reference point, it would look like the constellation in the sky. Then you could ask the question, oh, gee, if you want someplace else in the galaxy, would you see the same constellation? And so you'd have these people out there with their lights where you would definitely see the same asterism or the same constellation from the earth. But if they move to one side or if they move in the midst of these stars, would they see the same constellation? And that would be kind of an interesting way to represent how these are our constellations. They're no one else's asterisms. They're our asterisms and not asterisms from another potential solar system out there or planetary system. Cool. We have another scale model of the solar system. If you want to do that scale in our solar system tool kit that's scaled to a one meter sun and you create the Jupiters, whatever, about this big, but... We actually use that a lot, but... Yeah, just walking it out. We can't use a one meter sun for our school like when we're trying to stay within a city park. Totally, I like the six inch model. We actually use both kits when we talk about the scale model. Yeah, it's really neat to see those different scales all together. Ron, will you share that out loud, please? I love what you just said. I'd like to hear it to make sure that everyone hears it and in case they don't read it. Ron, can you unmute yourself? Yeah, what do you want to me to say? Oh, Ron. Oh, yeah. No, Mike. Oh, maybe no, Mike. Okay, yeah. Oh, rats. Okay, well, Ron's got something really cool. He said that with the solar system walk, I tell kids to run at light speed from the sun to the earth. They always go way too fast. You have to take eight minutes. It's so slow. I love that. That's great. Even at the one meter sun activity, that would take, you'd have to walk really slowly. Walking from Andromeda to the Milky Way, you're going to have to take a few billion, a couple, quite a while. Yeah, absolutely. That's really cool. I like that. You can either do, yeah, walk at the speed of light or walk at the speed of Andromeda and us smashing into each other. You get to take a break after that, but can you do that? I'm going to go live the rest of my life. Well, the only way you can have is you can have a group and then if they did that and if they collided it, it's kind of like, well, we didn't run into each other. That's a recipe for disaster. I don't know, two big groups of kids, one once at one another. Could be fun though. We'll do the solar system scale in another one of these for sure. Or you can check online at the same place if you just look up solar system or scale models, it'll be in there. All right, well, any misconceptions that you've noticed about any of the scaling activities? Anyone have anything that has kind of stood out over the years? This was a good one from Ram that he's mentioning using the kit, including those slides that show the size that can pair planets to the sun. That's a really interesting model too. And then we have another PowerPoint that compares the sun to other stars. But there's a video that compares that nicely too. That's a fun one. I guess that's one of the things too is a lot of times we model these things and we don't necessarily do them to scale. And so having the caveat that this is not to scale. But sometimes that doesn't even make sense to people because they do have a difficult time with scaling activities in general. I think a lot of us, astronomers tend to have the kind of brains that can think in those terms. We're fairly good at being able to shift our perspective and think outside of ourselves or outside of a system and look back at it mentally. And a lot of people aren't able to do that. And so as much as we can help them to be able to do that, we'll be good. And it's a way of finding other ways to help them look at things from different perspectives. It's not easy. And we don't wanna confuse people any more than what they already are. So it's a challenge. We had to figure it out ourselves once. Luckily, we have lots of practice doing it, thinking about it, but they can also figure those out as we go. As they get better at it. I had a couple of things I was noticing. One idea, which is just cause I was at the gym a couple of hours ago and I'm hungry. So I was thinking about the galaxy models and making them this scale, like just size with each other before you throw them out at the scale distance. Mostly because they sort of look like cinnamon rolls. I was thinking pizzas. It's like different cookies and cinnamon rolls of different sizes. Like, and it's easy to take the cinnamon roll and peel it back to make it the right size. And it does tell you the right size on the. Yeah. The same. But the other thing is about people asking you about scale and difference. This is something like people will discuss. People often won't ask other people certain things, but they'll ask the friendly internet directly. The most, some of the things that they don't, they're embarrassed to ask. Usually it's, you know, like bathroom stuff or whatever, but what is it? The number one thing on the night sky network that I see every month when we get a little report on your top sites is the top, by far every month is the article about solar system, galaxy, universe. What's the difference? Once in a while someone asked me, but considering the rate that I see people searching for that, there's a lot of folks that are still a little confused about which of those is what. And so this fits in nicely with all these activities. Especially because even now, like science fiction has gotten a lot better about this than it used to be, but still they'll sometimes use like solar system and galaxy kind of interchangeably. Absolutely. Well, I have noticed that when I do these presentations and talk about the differences between solar system, galaxy and universe is like over 90% of them do not know the difference. And I'm really surprised at that, but then I kind of am gentle with it and they get them to understand and they are really surprised. But they never asked me, I just basically introduced that idea to them and then they're far more accepting to it. Great. Yeah, I mean, it's even, it's kind of funny. It's easy to forget that like, knowing that there are galaxies and a universe beyond our galaxy is a fairly new concept even. Like not even, it hasn't even been 100 years when they kind of established that. Like we still have some old books in our archives with the ASP that just talk about the Andromeda nebula of like from 1900, 1920. Yeah. 1930, thank you, Todd. Yeah. That's a neat idea, David was pointing out too about how far our signal has gone about a hundred light year radius. Somebody might have possibly heard us, how many stars would that get to be? That's a neat way to incorporate aliens. And when people start asking about aliens, there's lots of fun ways to incorporate them into scale models. I was also gonna say with really young kids, it might be good. I mean, even up to 10 years old, it might be good to talk about what a scale model is before you start on these. So you can talk about, you know, a scale model car or a baby doll is just a model of a baby doll. It's got some of the same features, but often they're a different size. And they don't, it's not exactly the same. So we're representing some things, but not others. Like these are not hot, they're not stars. It's just a picture of stars. So models are really good at representing some things and not others. And with younger kids, it's good to just have a brief introduction in that way to talk about scale models. That's exactly what I do. It's a really great way to introduce modeling and simulation in STEM talks that we have. You know, I also use the yardstick for the solar system talking about the earth moon scale. I use the yardstick as a good, anybody can do this. Here's how you do it with that earth moon scale. And then we just go beyond there when the Mars was close. I had some marbles that are 3,000 scale size of the earth, the moon and Mars and get to kids to question about how far, this is how far away the moon is, how far away is Mars? And they never get that right. They think it's about 10 feet away from the representative size earth and it's actually like 200 yards that it's closest than a mile at its furthest on that scale. But then we go, I use the slides as I pointed out and we walk them from, you know, the sun all the way out to, you know, as you did there on the Hubble deep field. So it gives them a great idea of exactly what that scale of the universe is. Awesome. Very cool. It's been so nice seeing everybody on here. It's great and thank you for all these fabulous ideas. Yeah, this is fantastic. So I think that that's pretty, well, wraps us up for tonight then. So you'll be able to find this webinar as one with many others on the Night Sky Network, the website in the outreach resources section. Each webinar is paid to also feature additional resources and activities, including the links to the activities that we add here. And so we will post tonight's webinar also on the Night Sky Network YouTube channel in the next few days. So let me turn off the recording here.