 Okay, we'll welcome to this evening's webinar featuring activities from the NASA night sky networks shadows and silhouettes outreach toolkit nsn outreach tool kits come in boxes that usually look like this and this is the The one and so if you've got this little logo on it, then you know that you've got the right one and these are filled with A puffer of ziploc bags and a variety of materials with the that you need to do The activities your astronomy group may make regular use of them or they're unused on a shelf somewhere And it is even possible your group may have an entire set of these tool kits that no one knows about We've found out that there are some clubs that have every single one of them And a former member kept them in his basement or her basement And the newer board members don't know that they exist and so it's and if you're not sure Whether or not your club has these you can always give uh sent an email to To dav prusper and he can let you know whether or not your club has one of these So our goal 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 to your collection of tool kits 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 This webinar is featuring activities from the shadows and silhouettes toolkit You can also find them on the night sky network website, which I think dav will put that link in the chat window here shortly So over the next half hour or so we will show you a few of the activities in the toolkit This is not meant to be exhaustive This is going to be just basically a survey of what's in the toolkit And as well as give you a chance to share how you have used the toolkit And and or how you engage your members of the public and learning more about Eclipses or other shadow and silhouette type events transit certainly fit into that So here's vivian to get us started Hi everybody so good to see your faces. I love this format so I can actually See some of you while I'm talking to you. Nice to see familiar faces Um, I just wanted to start with some really easy things that you can use from this toolkit These are some of my favorites that I pull out all the time. There's the sky watchers guide to the moon It's got a picture of the full moon and you can see some it points out some of the features of it It's also got a close-up of the pernicus up here um the impact craters and it's got a Reverse view that you can use if you're showing the moon through a telescope. So it's a really easy one to pick out You could just make copies. I like to put our clubs information on the back upcoming events and things like that These are all available. Each of these are available on the website And you can search just search moon and you would find most of these When you wouldn't find around the moon because it's not about the moon Is actually called a trip around the triangle and this is also a handout that you can just print double-sided You fold it in half and it's got a picture of the summer triangle not useful right this minute, but very soon It will be summer again and not raining and snowing And this gives you a picture of the summer triangle. This toolkit was actually Sponsored by the Kepler mission and it talks because the Kepler mission used transits in order to Find uh planets around distant stars We put this toolkit out in 2006 and there was an update to it in 2015 So oh if you are seeing a small small picture, you can click on my picture there and say pin video and that will You'll be able to see better in a larger view what i'm showing. I don't know if that helps Daniel was just mentioning that the picture was so small No, or you can hit the speaker view if you're looking at the gallery view you can switch to speaker view And it will isolate the one person who's speaking Right. Thank you. Good point. Um, uh, so I hope that helps um the The Kepler mission um And the seddie institute the search for extraterrestrial extraterrestrial intelligence Put this out with us um sponsored us to put this out for the night sky network And the trip around the triangle is used because kepler on the inside It shows the search area for kepler here between vega and denib And um, and it shows some of the things you can see in the summer triangle So and it lists them kind of by types of objects So it gives a little bit of context to what you're looking at in the summer We encourage you to also have somebody pointing out the constellations because that's Something that your visitors will be able to see wherever they are in addition to You can make check marks or try and see as many of these things in an evening as you can It's a nice summer um worksheet that you can do We often hand out a sticker or something at the end if someone gets one from each category If we have a big group of people at the telescopes, we try and encourage them to look at a Something that's on the website Yeah, all of these resources are on the night sky network website. This one's called trip around the triangle You can find lots of handouts and Um and sky charts and many things that you can just print out and use on the night sky network website Then before I go on and pass this on I want to show you one of my other great favorites And this one was a marnie baronson She she designed this toolkit a long time ago. Many of you know her if you've been around the night sky network for a while Um, and this one has to do with the how the how night rises Night doesn't fall it rises and it talks about if you have this is the earth here and of course the day side and the night side You can see pretty well After sunset if you look Um instead of looking at the west at the sunset if you look towards the east you can watch night rise And it's really beautiful. It's called the belt of venus Um, and there's been lots of discussions in our group about why it's called that. Um, it's pretty interesting But what happens is as the earth is turning and I've got the sun shining on the earth here Imagine my fingers are the atmosphere now the atmosphere is not nearly as thick as my fingers But imagine them here. So as you're turning the I think let's see if you can see it here You can watch as the shadow creeps up my fingers creeps up the atmosphere and eventually you'll become Night and you can watch as this is kind of a it doesn't go the other way obviously But if you're coming around and the night will creep up on The atmosphere so you'll see a band of a Blue gray kind of appear and there are great pictures of it in the write-up each of these Uh, right each of these activities has a full write-up. We're just giving kind of the cliff notes version here So there's lots more detail to it. You can find out a lot more So those are a few of my favorites and really easy ones just to pick up and talk about I think I'm passing it on to you Brian for some That involve a little bit more mood lighting Yes, it's definitely some mood lighting here and uh, I've got the one camera obscured and so I'm going to switch cameras here And so now I'm I have this nice work surface here I had to make some adjustments to the lights because a couple of things that Are interesting and it's going to be kind of a challenge to do in here because one of the ideas is going along with this idea of shadows and objects casting their own shadows is Why is it that the moon has phases? So what causes the moon phases? Well, there's lots of misconceptions that people have about the moon phases and they don't quite get the notion that Oh, it's the moon Shading shadowing itself And so one of the great things that you can do is that if you have some of these polystyrene balls some of the smooth foam balls and then Impale them on a pencil or a skewer or something like that And it's really cool that you can take this out And if the moon is up and vivian's got a really great picture to show us here So let's see if vivian can bring this picture up I hope you see it now. Do you guys see the picture? And I cannot because I've got That screen covered up right now Okay, we've got a thumbs up Okay, so fantastic And so what this is is you take this outside and if you have some sun that's still up And this works really great when the moon is up during the daytime Is you hold this up until the shadow on the white ball Matches the shadow or matches the phase that the moon is in and so now you kind of you have the configuration Of what the moon the actual moon is in around the earth is the same as the model moon The white moon ball is around your head And so then you could move it around your head with a very strong light source The sun is a fantastic light source for this And so you can move it around and see how the phases change It's really difficult to model that here in the studio We played around with it for quite some time and couldn't quite overcome the The geometry of how to do this Because it really does require you to be able to move in three dimensions and really We only have a couple of dimensions that we could move in here. So vivian go ahead and If you go ahead and stop sharing We're seeing you now. You're seeing me now And so one of the things is that we can imagine that we have the earth and if you Take in if you imagine that your head is in the position of the earth And so I've got a light source off here to my right And then you take the moon and you take the moon and you orbit it around the earth You're not going to be able to see the phases change On this but if you're on the earth in the middle there, you would be able to see The shadows change on the white ball Just the same way that they change on the actual moon in In orbit around the earth That also answers a common question of does the moon rotate We get that quite often from school children. They're tricked into that one often So they can decide for themselves Yeah, so many different things and so there there's some other things you can do So one of our favorite things to do too Is and this is something that didn't quite appear in there But one of the things that we like to do with groups is we give them a set of three balls And so here I have three balls Ball here a little bit smaller ball and a much smaller ball here And so I've got three balls here and so we can challenge visitors to an event and say Two of these balls are in the correct size ratios to represent the earth and the moon And so we can challenge them to select the two that they think represent the earth and the moon So you might get you know, there's a variety of combinations here that they could come up with and it's kind of interesting to find out Well, why is it that you chose that particular pair? You know, what is it that you knew? That you're drawing on to cause you to choose those two And so you get a chance to work with that and then if you actually give them some actual numbers Especially if you're working in a classroom setting Then you can have the people actually check to see which two Actually represent the earth and the moon It turns out that it's these two the middle sized one and the smallest one because we've got the Earth model here is about four times the diameter of the moon model here And so you could line up four of these little ones four of the little ones You know line across the earth And so then you could ask people how far apart do you think that they are? Now invariably we've discovered that if we set these down and ask people to You know, this is the size they're too Scale size wise and ask them to put them how far apart they think they should be and we've put them down like this Invariably, what do you think that people do? So what do you think people do and so you could uh You know, I mean, I can't see this but maybe Vivian could so um, you know drop something in the chat window or call something out Unmute yourself real quick. What do you think people typically do when you say put these two objects to how far apart you think that they would be Relative to one another they leave them there and say that's as far apart as they are Yep, Ken Yeah, Dave said they're too close Yeah, everybody thinks the moon it looks so darn close And so, you know, that's the very typical things that they leave it Well, you put them down there you must have put them down in the right spot And so maybe they'll take it and they'll take the moon and then well, let's see that's not quite It's a little bit too close. So I'm gonna move it to right there And they move it just a you know a little teeny tiny amount And so what this does is that you get you kind of find out what your visitors are thinking about And then you can bring out an actual model And so in the shadows and silhouettes toolkit and a lot of you also got these for the eclipse last year You can bring this out and here's our yardstick yardstick eclipse model And so when you set this up, they are set on here 30 inches apart We have a one inch diameter moon or earth down here And the moon is 30 earth diameters away and so you could set that this is conveniently In inches and so one inch and then 30 inches away is our quarter inch moon And so now we have this scale model where they are to scale size and to scale Distance and so people invariably are rather surprised. It's kind of wow. I had no idea. It was that far away Then you can challenge them to see if they can make an eclipse And so there's two kinds of eclipses, of course solar eclipses and lunar eclipses And so you're going to get them to be able to be the ones who make these and so here I've got this set up here I've got a white board back here to help us to align the shadows You discover that if you don't have a means to help align shadows It becomes very very challenging to get the shadows actually lined up And so I use that to line up and it's going to be real challenged about to see this Let's see if I can bring this a little bit closer. And so Let's if we line this up and so there you might be able to see that we have the shadow from the small bead On the earth down there. You might be able to see that we have put it into a shadow And so here we've made a solar eclipse and then most people will hopefully know that the reverse is a lunar eclipse And so on sunday we will have this where the moon is going into earth's shadow Another really great thing that you can do with this Besides modeling eclipses is that a lot of questions that people have you know, how many people come in and say oh gee What's a supermoon? What's a micro moon? And so what does that really mean? And so what the you can you can do is you can use this to be able to help demonstrate that it turns out that a supermoon is where the moon is Our model moon is about two inches closer about two earths diameter Closer it could be up to two earths diameter closer So two inches closer or during a micro moon. It might be two inches further away And so you think well gee that's not very much and you know, it's less than 10 in either direction So that's kind there's another opportunity to use this model to help your visitors understand both micro moons and super moons So now over to you, dave all righty, so Got our little fake sun here for our snake light um I'm going to be using this for a couple of activities uh demonstrating the transit activity and for the venus phases now first The venus or mercury phases It's called why does venus look like the moon? This is a short demonstration so you can grab one of the little stick models with the Little moon in there and once I'm just gonna Checking something on here Let me There we go. I'm just making sure I don't ramble. I have a timer so um Anyway, so what I recommend is holding a little stick like this and I'm going to turn off the lights So now we just have our beautiful fake sun and our beautiful model venus So you can see it's just as you orbit it around the sun you can already see how the phases are changing here and You can actually if you want to get really detailed with this you can find some demos online That uh also incorporate you can find basically a map of the solar system at its current state So if you're observing venus you can set this up next to your venus observations And then make all the geometry match so that you can make it look Exactly like venus looks now Which right now it's like it's pretty thin large crescent, which is pretty large and getting smaller as it's orbiting So this also works for mercury if you want to make it redo the outer planets You just put this on the other side of you you'll need a much more powerful light source for that though So but then you can demonstrate why the outer planets don't really have phases and why that is but In the process of demonstrating this you'll notice that you're also basically accidentally doing a transit itself so um With this You can Use this basically the same setup, but you'll might want to grab um A couple of sizes See what works best for you with this and your guests So we have a lot of little different models so you can stick on the things to use for this And for the transit authority activity It does two things it demonstrates the transits of venus and mercury on our sun And there is a transit of mercury this november. I believe on the 11th in the morning for folks in the u.s um So at sunrise This also works to demonstrate a How the detectors on kepler and now tests are measuring the brightness of stars to detect the planets Not viewing the planets themselves, and we'll show that in one second, but first Um, yeah pick your pick your little model. I'm going to pick the smallest Little ball here to demonstrate a mercury And you can just see yep as it goes across the surface. You see the transit there and You can also um with a group of people you can ask this group if they all see the transit and a lot of times Not everyone will and that's great because that shows how precise the angle has to be for us here on earth to Witness a venus or mercury transit, and they're pretty rare Um, they're not annual. It's every few years to every hundred years or so Um 112 years. I think something like that for the next one for venus Um, you folks will know that better than me um Now if you want to demonstrate Like how hard it is to see further away You can just walk back 20 feet And then like do the little ball there now have a hard time picking it up And that's a good intro if you want to demonstrate How um exoplanets are detected and that's my last little bit here. You basically just take a little white card And set it up near the ball And by taking another up like object and paying attention to the Card you notice that the overall brightness of the card decreases as the transit happens You can use different sizes of planets for different amounts of brightness decreasing And that's basically it and that's all I got for that one. And yeah, just Look out for that mercury transit. I hope you all have good weather for that in november cross fingers there And that's it Yeah, it's interesting because we didn't use unfortunately the stars are so far away. We can't see The the transit itself like we can see from mercury venus, but we can See how the light dims a little bit and that's the difference there Yeah, that's the big thing for um like when uh for a little kepler and test outreach is emphasizing that even though they're space telescopes They're not looking at the exoplanets. They're looking at like the evidence of them, but not directly Right, right. Yeah, okay Uh, I think I'm next and I was just gonna show Um, we have we get a question a lot about when's the best time to view the moon isn't The full moon a great time to view the moon and as we all know, you know, blow your eyeballs out If you look at it through a telescope, we're even binoculars. So, um, uh, one of the best times to view the moon is not during full moon and um As you see if you shine a light Um, like this being the sun on a ball Even this is a little bit of a wild because it's uh overexposing on this video But you'll see that you don't see too much detail right here. I've got a model of the moon You can make these in flower. You can uh do all have a really good time. The write-up's got a lot of ideas there Oh Uh, can you guys hear me? Okay? This rain is really loud I mean if you could it could be that you've got You know the model in front of your microphone Or if you could bump up the gain on your microphone, that would be great. Yep. Okay. I'll talk a little bit louder to start with I hope that's a little better um, well, you can see um when you hold the Flashlight at the side you see so much more detail on the moon when it's in a phase as opposed to a full moon uh when it's in a Smaller phase than the full moon, I guess And this is just showing why it's uh best to look at the moon when it's not a full moon Which is counterintuitive to a lot of people There are a lot of different ways of doing this and in our new moon toolkit Well, we hope to include some of the 3d models that That nasa has put out if you look at the spotting craters activity that um Dave just put up You'll see there's a link to you can make a 3d model of the lunar surface if you've got access to that often libraries Will have access to 3d printers and you can make a lunar surface that you can use it's not quite as messy as the flower and um, cocoa model that we all that's also really fun. Um, but not always An easy way to do that Okay, so that was the last of my Bit in the dark. Um, it's also you see a lot more wrinkles when Are at a phase it turns out much better for a full moon The full moon helps reveal the magic of instagram filters and um tv lighting Okay, oh, that's me next. All right, so I have a couple more and these are gonna be super brief because they're all pretty informal Um, this next one is called where the sunlight stars the sunlight stars and it's a power point presentation You can download it From the night's gonna go put the link up. Um after i'm done I'll just put it up right now And it's you can download it right here And what it basically does is you don't need to use the power point basically There's it's just an activity to discuss with folks um How rare are uh our type the sun the type of star our sun is actually is It's not the most common star in the universe And it's not the rarest But uh, it is pretty special and as far as we know, it's the most conducive to life There's of course debates about that and you know The life might exist anywhere. We don't know But the big thing is uh the stars that you're seeing in the night sky They're almost all giant stars. Um, which are about one percent of the Uh star types out that are visible for us Yep, there's only two other sunlight stars that we can see naked eye in the sky Um from where we are and it's aida cassiopeia and um Tau sedi Uh, if you're in the southern hemisphere, you can see the alfacentari stars as well not proxmo, which is actually the closest one So That's kind of that. I just put the download link for that power point there Um The other big one. So the next one is what is a habitable zone? This is a great one for scouts. If you're doing like a camp activity You can actually kind of incorporate the uh campfire into discussing the habitable zone But you know, if you don't have a campfire or you're restricted from fires Of course, we can you can simulate it with cellophane or some other fire for once For our sun a little candle for a dwarf star We can kind of walk through it's like they call the habitable zone the goldilocks zone Um because it's where liquid water is it's the temperature is not too hot. It's not too cold It's just right for liquid water to exist on a planet similar to earth in this particular area around the star So if someone is standing very close to the um fire You know or your fake fire, it's going to be kind of like mercury baron dry way too hot for any kind of water If it's too far out Can they kind of be like mars or any of the outer planets way too cold any y'all water there is ice You can mix it up by having people put on jackets and stuff to simulate atmospheres So that kind of changes things a little bit about habitability too and how we do it Um, and yeah, you can use a regular candle or a little like this that we include in the kit Or a fancy little led candle from the dollar store Um to kind of simulate what a dwarf star and it's very tiny habitable zone would be Um compared to our suns You can always like make a giant giant star Ask how big that habitable zone will be that's basically it It's a fun little interactive demo and it's pretty loose and um great for audience participation and uh That's it I'll put the notes in the the link in there too. Great. Thank you So that's kind of a survey about a lot of the activities that are in the toolkit And so what we'd like to do Is we'd like to hear from all of you and that's the beauty of using this format rather than the format that we use For the science webinars is that we can hear from you So we'd like to find out about how you go about using these activities How you go about engaging people Around these sorts of phenomena that we're looking at any kind of misconceptions that a lot of the people Might have that come to your events And so let's uh kind of see if we can hear from some of you Hello, so I just put that I just Michael I looked it up to see Yeah Yeah, it's kind of funny. It's like with alphas and tarry like it's a binary But the star is a g type and so is uh It's a g3 according to wikipedia for capela. So thank you Thanks don I'll speak up. I've got a terrible cold Oh, Michael, let me start it over. Let's see if I can cut Yeah, one comment about um one thing we had talked about Someone mentioned about the flower and I agree that the uh the 3d models are far better than the flower one of the things with A lot of people having gluten allergies sometimes that's uh, It's frowned on we're having flower at some things because you never know I've done the um phases with uh all different groups schools and girl scout troops and stuff problem I always have is Uh, I could really only Work with about six Students at a time You know, I tried once in a whole classroom So that doesn't work because it's difficult for uh the students to see it So usually the students are sitting like in tables of six or so And that works out so much better. So I just move my lamp over to the small table and then work with that small group Yeah, it is a challenge working with large groups, especially so many classes these days tend to be so large We like to if you can clear out the tables or find a large open space And put the lamp in the middle and kind of make a a big circle An extended circle around the lamp And that way you can look across and everyone can see each other Everyone can see you and so that's something that we've done with large groups You know, it doesn't necessarily have to be a class But maybe it could be even in an informal setting if you have a large group outside say at some outdoor event So that's that's one way that that we've been able to overcome that but certainly working in small groups is Is always good because then they can explore some of their own ideas Yeah, that's a good idea. Also when we've done our public meetings up on mount diablo Uh Just uh towards sunset Doing that activity works really good because the sun is somewhat dim And you then you could do a bigger group. Oh, yeah What ken said it was having trouble with uh With the large group. I've done it in the library With a whole bunch of families and I used a pole lamp It illuminated the light in all directions and everybody had a stick with a sphere on it and everybody would Do the phases around their head By standing in a circle around the light and that seemed to work with a large group Great. That's a good idea Also to share what I've done with that kit with that toolkit um There's a question. Why don't you have a faith uh an eclipse every time there's a new moon and a full moon And there's a really cool Thing that you construct in the toolkit that shows the way they the moon's orbit is angled and it's got You use a light around a table and you watch the shadow and you have this little moon going around a bigger sphere And we made a whole bunch of extra ones of those we we bought hemispheres and and we velcroed them together and we and we used cds and We made a whole we made 24 of them and I've done it with a large a large group of young astronomers where they sit around Separate tables with with lamps little lights around in the middle of each table and and it worked we were able to demonstrate that Only only one person would see the an eclipse around the table When the when the moon went into that little node spot Yes, that's what we did Except the uh the earth models which are the larger white sphere were on sticks And they they were able to turn the moon around, you know Revolve the moon around the earth and it worked it worked very well I had my biggest problem was to buy extra lights. I wound up buying these little Uh, I don't know these little holiday things. I don't remember what I used but uh That would stand on the table It worked very well That's fantastic Michael was talking about in the chat about the 3d models that nasa has they have an amazing repository of models Um print all sorts of things if you get Um a 3d printer or have access to one It's been really fun to have models of each of these things and talk about Where the Hubble Space Telescope is for example, or Something that you're seeing on the moon too Great, uh don Uh, great. Yeah, if you would like some more toolkits send us an email and let us know We're happy to get you any that you need that you don't have yet As long as you're actively logging events. We're thrilled to send more. So there are lots of them We have we've made about a dozen. This is one of This is our second toolkit Talk But uh, there I think there are nine that are available currently So there's a list on the website They are listed on the website. Yes So back to the 3d models and and we're going to have something Some instructions in the new toolkit that we're working on on on the moon Um, and we're probably at some point once we get the uh instructions that are easy to follow Both the lunar trek and so there's two sites on nasa lunar trek and mars trek And they're really really a high resolution with all the different data sets from all the different missions And they have a function in there where you can actually generate your own files To that you can convert into uh, and then use with a 3d printer to print out Any feature that you want? off the moon or off of mars and so at some point Um, we're going to ask, uh, our good friend brian day Who is one of the developers of them to get us some good directions that are easy to follow And we'll be posting those at some point Yeah, thanks for posting those two links dave You can actually if you just get on to i've done on lunar trek I haven't done the mars trek yet, but you can actually just make a um Some sort of rectangle and say give me the file to print this and it will give it to you in one of two forms So it's really easy Um to make happen I don't even do 3d printing and I could do it Sometimes finding the command is a little uh Challenging for people and so having a screenshot of saying click on this sometimes is uh necessary But we will get that at some point And michael, I completely agree about getting the visitors to actually handle all of the materials that is So engaging and so much more so than showing the demo actually asking them to figure it out on their own Way more interesting and they've remember it way better because they have discovered something on their own I agree Especially like doing things like do you want to be the moon? Do you want to be venus or a planet or whatever? It's kind of funded I'm that little bit That's something i've done with the uh, uh, the yardstick activity is uh, I actually went out and bought Additional kit so of the yardstick activity. So I have a total of nine um A lot of people might know that the girl scouts now have their Science explorer activities that they're working on and one of them is to work on identify And do the earth moon scale so I would set out all the yardsticks And I actually got the full-size yardsticks because those are a little bit easier for the kids to handle and On the other little thing that I did was I glued the uh balls on top of the uh toothpicks. So Um, they don't get lost that way. Um, because a lot of people will find that those balls are easy to get lost And uh, you set them out on a table and you talk them through that activity And have the kids actually work in groups of two or however many kids you have so they can work together and And uh working through the exercise of getting the right scale And then they can do the eclipse activities and things like that Then the other thing that we do is I have a basketball and a tennis ball So then you know, you have somebody be the earth and somebody be the moon and the kids can try to figure out How far away Is the basketball from the tennis balls so that we have that scale so now they have a pretty good idea about How far it is and they they can get pretty close and then we can measure it with a measuring tape about Actually how far that is which is like 23 Point one feet. I think something like that. So so that's what we do for for that activity The other thing I wanted to just mention is I I use the moon handout a lot I find that is one of the best uh moon handouts that we have Um to print out and have available for people They like to take things home and that gives them something in their hands as they're going around most of our outreach Star parties have some component of the moon up in the sky so they can uh have that handout With them when they're uh going to the different telescopes look in at the moon So that's what that's what we're doing here Is there anything missing from that handout that you would like we're going to do some updates for the 50th anniversary And that was one of the things we were thinking about if you guys have other things that you'd love to see on there If you can think of them now, let us know or if you think of them later, send an email. That would be great I love what david's doing with uh the art sticky clips as we do some similar things in our uh teacher professional Element that we do one of the things that we do as far as getting into the scale is we'll give each group Each pair of teachers a different baggie with a set of three balls kind of like what i showed here But they're not the identical three balls so that you kind of get away from having somebody be able to Oh gee, I don't know which one I should choose and then they look over. Well, what did they choose? Oh They've got a completely different set of balls than I do and so I can't uh kind of you know figure out what I'm so they actually have to rely on themselves to be able to come up with some sort of You know Their own model rather than getting someone else's model and so that's something that that we've done As far as the scaling activities and so david it's I I love what you're doing with the girl scout groups being able to have those Ratios allows you to do it at any size you want Well, and this is what it what it does too is that If you've done anything about the angular size of the moon and you realize and and that it's about You know if the real moon is up and you hold your pinky out It turns out it's about half a pinky and so if you've made your scale model correctly And so you put the earth here where your eye is and you got the moon out there Stick your finger out here and the moon is about half a pinky And so it's an interesting check that you can make it doesn't matter What size the balls are or what the distance are as long as the ratios And the scaling is correct every single time you have that if you're using the tennis ball and the basketball Then if you're where the basketball is the tennis ball will be about that big If you're using the one inch and the quarter inch bead the bead will be about that big So it's just that one is a whole lot closer Can you all hear me? Yep. Okay. I was just saying that In all the outreach that I was doing the I'm never hitting real problems with the balls and anything along those lines But my problem was mainly with the with the light source most of the light sources that that I had or I had access to even LED flashlights had a tendency to have really soft edges and really be Kind of a broad beam So it was really hard to kind of show the the really sharp edges You know, especially whenever you're talking about like a solar eclipse and things along those lines and so I just sort of I sort of Solved it. I had a friend of mine kind of build a flashlight with some high powered LEDs and I actually made like a filter slide to go in front of it and I could then Punch the whole sizes that I wanted in various millimeter sizes and I could make the aperture the size that I wanted And I could then adjust it accordingly for whatever type of particular Demonstration I was doing and that seemed to work really well. I just thought I'd pass that along I don't know where you could buy something like that Like I said, I had a friend of mine's electronics guy that built it for me But the aperture right the apertures in front of the light source definitely helped a whole lot Yeah And as Vivian notes, our favorite light source is the sun You know, the sun is far enough away and it's strong enough and and it's small enough It's it doesn't have that breadth and so you're always end up with nice sharp shadows as long as you don't have clouds Yeah, I was I was mainly talking about when you know a lot of times I'll give talks in the evening And you just don't have that source So one thing that if you if you know anyone that has an old overhead projector Get one of those those things actually work fairly well They they're they become rare commodities these days But sometimes you can find them used and get them for not very much Or maybe they're giving them away too. You never know A computer a computer projector works too, especially if it's far away okay Yeah, I was going to say that as well that the regular You know 3200 lumens projector that light is bright enough that you can do a pretty good A shadow for that Activity the other thing that I have is I bought like the most powerful lumen flashlight I think like a thousand lumen flashlight I got from a hardware store and That works pretty good But you have to you know have somebody play with you to get those shadows to work just right You know, this would be the sort of thing if if any of you have constructed any of these devices We would love to be able to Have you share some images or maybe something vivian? I don't know whether we have a means for people to share some of these ideas But I would love to be able to you know see some pictures and Be able to have people share some of these great ideas that they have Yeah, Dave has written up some really cool articles on hex that people have done to the night sky network toolkits and there are some really great ones places where you can put Oh, hey look somebody's sharing their screen Great Brandon look at that Cool Oh, yeah, it's got the full solar system kit and everything Wonderful Um, yeah, there were some great banner holders that people had constructed Yeah, please send them along and we'll um, we'll write that up And we always like to be able to uh, you know Give kudos out to the groups and Love to put your pictures of what you're doing in the newsletters You know, it gets boring when you just see pictures of us We want to see pictures of what you guys are doing I'll put the pictures up if you send them in to the night sky info And I'll often try to find them in the logs too There's always so many good pictures in the logs and we're working in a way And then future update to the website for folks to more easily Share pictures and logs if they want their records of their events, but that's Kind of far in the future at the moment, but for now Yes, like stuff that you've done with toolkits toolkit hacks like to call them I would like to write them up in articles and post them in the newsletter Share them on instagram and social media and stuff Yeah Please send us your your hacks They send us your your toolkits in use we love them And if there's a good picture we might even use it as one of the toolkit images on the resource page too We like to keep them updated and fresh and to show people actually You know what they're using them in in the real world too, which is always fun Rather than a couple of hands holding a ball or something which Works All right, do we have anything from anyone else? Yeah, I don't know. We're I just got Our internet here at the office apparently has become unstable. Maybe the storm or something. So Um, it happens when it rains a lot in in our area in san francisco. We get sometimes some some flaky connectivity Sometimes we get flooded not today yet though I think jarlon's got one of her Creations with her. Yeah, I was wanting to mention today. I just used this I made this little light box if you can see that it has a tiny little like a light and I used the yardstick Eclipse thing and and I used a dry erase board to cast a shadow upon Or any whiteboard I suppose would work but What I really liked about it. It gave a really nice Umbra and penumbra So you can actually see that and I can describe that to them too and it kind of looks like a Kind of like a real scenario. So I really enjoyed that and this light seemed to give me that effect Well, you get both penumbra and number. Wow, that's great That's hard to do. Yeah, it looked really nice. It was very defined and you can really describe it to them Because when you tell them about it, they just don't understand or grasp what you're saying But I was actually able to show it to them and so they really understood it And I even got some wow The next time you do that if you could get a photo of that, I'd love to see a photo of that in action Oh, yeah, sure I will do that. Thank you And Zahn's asking what kind of bulb you're using Well, let's see Let me check it out here. I made this little box and it's really kind of handy. It's got a little light switch on it It's on this side And I want to put a dimmer switch in it because it looks it works really well if you put a red light in it If you're doing something outside and you got a a nice big moon and you kind of use the red light to Kind of illuminate things if you want to but it's just a It's just a little bitty like a flood light, but it's a smaller one And it's uh, it looks like it's a 40 water 45 48 watts 45 watts So it's it's not a very big one, but it works great Is it an led? Is it an led or uh, no, it's just it's an incandescent. Okay So it gets really hot. So Don't try to take it out of your Socket till it cools off But the kids really enjoyed that demonstration when I did it for them today And I had like four of the Uh yard sticks and so they all got to play with it and try to demonstrate and create their little Eclipses You know, I almost think I hear a telescope slewing there Oh, it's my laptop because I'm old out that my laptop and it's overheating. Okay. It gets warm It's an ancient laptop I wish you guys all clear skies and not too much snow or cold Michael was just saying it's wind chills predicted to be negative 10 on sunday Wow That is some fierce determination you have if you're getting out to view it then maybe you can view it from your window And warm. I hope you guys have clear clear skies That's remarkable. We're really spoiled here Temperature wise anyway temperature wise not fog wise Yeah, yeah One thing my students ask a lot of questions about is how come the lunar eclipse is red And we've had them try different things, but we've taken fish tanks And not no fish just an empty fish tank with water in it And shine a white light through it and you can do it with incandescent or probably led I haven't tried it with an led, but I think it would work And then you add a couple drops of milk to it And you will start to see the more milk you add it gets redder and redder So they get the idea that there have to be particles that are What are they doing slowing down the light and that's your longer wavelengths All right, we got time for another uh person to share I'll share one other thing. Uh, I haven't done the activity itself yet the transits But I'm going to be doing that at one of our next activities But uh, I was had a darn heck of a time trying to get a hole through the ping pong ball to get the snake light through So what I ended up doing I've I worked a I got a pen light with a you know It has a bright light at the end and I found some uh clear replaceable Like poster material whatever that stuff is called and uh, you put that on top of the light The light can shine right through and then you put the ping pong ball right on top of that And that lights up the the whole ping pong ball. So, uh, I was able to uh do that activity Without having to drill into a ping pong ball and and do all that sort of thing. So That's just one other thing I that I have set up to do Yeah, that's a good one Well, we're a couple minutes here uh up to the hour and so Dave and Vivian any closing comments from either of you Just thanks to everybody. It's really nice to see your faces and hear your voices Good luck with the weather on sunday Yes Stay toasty Well, that's all for tonight You'll be able to find this webinar along with many others on the night sky network website in the outreach resources section Each webinars page also features additional resources and activities