Solar System and Outer Space

It has been a few months since my last update . .mainly because I never take a camera anywhere lately. . . .
here's a few shots from around the house in January . . Douwe got really interested in the solar system and kept building models all over the house. He ran out of little balls for the moons and used froot loops, and the black bracelet from Abby's wedding is having a second job as an asteroid belt.
The Magic School Bus book "Lost in the Solar System" gets main credit for getting Douwe curious. There is something fascinating and mind boggling about outer space once you start looking into it. All I knew from 5th grade science unit were a few terms like rotation, revolution, orbit, and the names not order of the nine planets. In the last few months we've checked out some books about Mars, Black Holes, Voyager, The Sun, and Asteroids, etc. and it all blows my mind. The vast distances, the dance moves of various orbits, the amounts of energy involved, it is all astronomical. We got a treat of a field trip to the Planetarium in Merrillville and saw a show about Mars, followed by a simulation of the night sky that day. It is so complicated, I wonder how scientists can even figure all this stuff out. How can radio waves travel so far to send photos from so far away? Most of it is over my head.