Start of Global Astronomy Month at the Ghana Planetarium

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Apr 09

2013

by Sarah Abotsi-Masters

"Stars, Constellations and Light Pollution"

We launched Global Astronomy Month at the Ghana Planetarium on Saturday 6^th April. Since this coincided with the Globe at Night campaign and International Dark Sky week, we made the theme of our event “Stars, Constellations and Light Pollution”. 

A good turnout of around 50 learned about constellations, their apparent movement during the night and throughout the year, and some of the myths and stories associated with them.  As always, our younger visitors asked and answered lots of questions, and had fun modelling the movement of the Earth round the Sun (to illustrate why we see different constellations throughout the night and throughout the year).  We also used the Nightshade planetarium software to demonstrate this visually.

Then it was activity time!  For the past couple of events we have had 4 or 5 students/interested friends acting as volunteers, which mean we can put on a range of hands-on activities for our visitors to try out.

We did activities to make a constellation viewer, make a planisphere (it’s surprisingly difficult to find one for our latitude, just 5 degrees North) and create your own constellation!  (Links to the activities below).

Afterwards we watched the wonderful “Losing the Dark” video on light pollution, then a Planetarium show about constellations and constellation myths.

The only downside to the event was that the cloudy sky meant that there was no opportunity for telescope viewing - but there’s always next time!

 Some photos of the event are attached.

 Links to the activities:

Create a constellation activity:

http://www.pacificsciencecenter.org/images/stories/pdf/astro_ad_constellation.pdf

http://www.darksky.org/assets/documents/education/Activity%20Book.pdf

Constellation viewer activity:

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/tv/stargazinglive/sgl_eventpack_with_links2013.pdf

Losing the Dark video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dd82jaztFIo