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Youth Capture the Colorful Cosmos

The New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science uses the MicroObservatory program during summer camp classes called Planetarium Producers.  The camp is designed for children entering grades 7-9.  Each participant has one week to acquire images, process them, and use them in a planetarium program presented at the end of the camp.

The MicoObservatory images developed for the past several years are displayed below.  Each child selected a constellation to focus on, and the only restriction was that it had to be one in which a MiroObservatory object was currently visible.  On the first day of class, the students worked through tutorials about how to order and open telescope images.  For the remainder of the week, each child processed the images in any way they wished to highlight whatever scientific fact they included in their programs.  During the planetarium shows they produced, the camp participants showed how to find the constellations they chose to focus upon, talked about their mythology, described the celestial objects in the images they produced, and highlighted any other interesting facts in their region of the sky.  The children’s family members and friends, along with some of the museum staff, attended the planetarium program.

Create your own astronomical images at Harvard's MicroObservatory

Find out more about the Youth Capture the Colorful Cosmos program.

2015 Camp

Electra - The Dumbell Nebula

Piper - The Hercules Cluster

Aidan - The Andromeda Galaxy

Dade - the Eagle Nebula

Sam - the Whirlpool Galaxy

James - Cygnus X-1

2014 Camp

Aden - Pinwheel Galaxy

Aden - Irregular Galaxy

Cator - Trifid Nebula

Cator - Sagittarius A/B/C

Dade - Earth's Moon

Dade - Quasar

James - The Milky Way

James - The Eagle Nebula

Jenna - NGC-4124

Jenna - Mars

 

 

 
Youth Capture the Colorful Cosmos is funded by the Smithsonian Institution's Youth Access Grants program managed by the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Education and Access. The project is led by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in partnership with Smithsonian Affiliations.
         
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