By Ally B (10), Chloe R (8), Avery W (10), Emma W (9) & Isabel M (9)

Nick, Crispin, Eli, Ally & Avery

This week at Medomak Family Camp, we made Fliskits rockets out of paper. We made all the parts mostly with glue, tape and clay. Were using real engines with engine fuel. They will shoot up and the top of the rocket will fall off and a streamer will pop out. The reason the streamer will come out is because when the engine fuel runs out, it will make a little poof of air and it will come up through the inside of the rocket and push off the nose cone.( the nose cone is a part at the top of the rocket) Then the the steamers will come out to help slow the rocket as it heads back to Earth.

We looked at sunspots with a telescope. Sunspots are places on the sun that cooler than the area around them. But cool on the sun is very, very hot here on earth. Sunspots are a 5-7,000°F while the rest of the surface is about 10,000°F.

We looked  at Saturn and its rings along with 2 moons. We also saw a satellite called Iridium that made a big flash in the sky that lasted about 3 seconds.

Emma W & Bruce preparing for launch

We saw the Big Dipper too, it’s very obvious-if you know where to look. If you find the two stars that form the end of the dipper and follow an imaginary line going through them you’ll see the north star.

Pointers to the North Star

We made Pocket Solar Systems. You take a very long strip of thin paper( it wasn’t wide). Then we took stickers and put them in this order- Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, then Asteroids. Then Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.

Editors Note: I’m calling this Part 1 because it should have been, since this article was written over 2 weeks agowhile Astronomy Week was still in session. Apologies go out to Ally, Chloe, Emma and Avery for not getting it published online sooner.

Jack, Jack, Chloe, Isabel, Emma, Jack & Bradley

Ally blogging

By Nick Sweeney, 14, Columbus, OH

While at Medomak Family Camp for a week I was able to interact and learn from two astronomers, Bruce Berger and Kelly Beatty, for the first time. I was not sure what exactly we were going to be doing for “Astronomy Week”. My guess was that we were going to be looking at some planets and several stars, and that that would be it. It turned out to be far more exciting than I had anticipated. What made it the best was how passionate Bruce and Kelly were about astronomy. Their energy made me and others want to learn about things that we had never heard of before.

The first thing that tingled my curiosity was that the telescopes seemed so simple and compact, for telescopes that is. I got to see two types of telescopes while I was there – a Reflecting telescope and a Refracting telescope. I thought that the reflective telescope was the most interesting because all it used was a couple mirrors that when put in the telescope focused on the object of your choice. Bruce even taught me how to make the mirrors for this type of telescope by grinding two pieces of glass with a special sand in between. When you do this with the side of one piece of glass on top of the middle of the other piece you can create a concave shape on the lower piece.  After a lot of grinding and polishing, it gets a coat of aluminum or silver and becomes the mirror.

I live in Columbus, Ohio so I am used to a lot of light pollution, which only lets me see several constellations. In Washington, Maine it was clear, and we were able to see lots more stars, satellites, and even the northern lights.

Image via Wikipedia

My favorite part of the week was when we learned about daylight astronomy. Some of the stuff was so weird that it sounded science-fiction. Two of the weirder things were moon-bows and the rare green flash. I thought that moon-bows were cool because the light of the moon still manages to create a rainbow under the right circumstances. Also, when you take pictures of moon-bows the light from the camera makes it look like a normal rainbow, except there are stars in the sky. The green flash  sounded like a myth the way people talked about it. It can only be seen on a perfect sunset, with clear skies, and nothing blocking the horizon. Only then will you see a tiny bit of green as the sun sets. Astronomy week has inspired me to try to see the green flash in my lifetime.

During Astronomy week I got to see double stars, clusters of stars, planets (my favorite was Saturn), and much more. Now I have learned how and when to locate stars like Arcturus, Polaris, and Vega using a star map on a wheel that I have made, with help from Kelly. I have also been inspired to download an app for my IPad that lets me learn more about things that I got a glimpse of, like special galaxies, sun spots, and nebulas. I also had lots of fun launching up rockets we made out of paper. They shot up hundreds of feet in the air and released streamers to have a gradual landing. This past week was a once in a lifetime experience thanks to Bruce, Kelly, and of course the universe.

Editors Note: This is the first blog entry written by our ‘students’ during Astronomy Week 2011 at Medomak Family Camp. Kelly & I had a blast with the families, kids, the heavenly dark Maine sky, and of course the rockets. As always, we love sharing our passions and knowledge about the earth, solar system and beyond. We hope if you’re reading this that you might have a look around the camp’s website and think about joining us next summer. – Bruce Berger

As you can see by previous posts from guest bloggers, Nick, Ally, Isabel, Chloe and Avery, we really did have a blast at Medomak Family Camp this past summer. And if a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video must be worth millions! So then without further discussion, here are videos of some of the kids’ rockets shooting up into the sky.

Image via Wikipedia

It’s raining here in Chelmsford but nothing can deter my annual pilgrimage to Stellafane in Springfield VT this weekend. I’ll be up there for dinner on Friday. Look for the ScopeMaker Prius just before the path that leads to the pavilion or at the swap tables early Saturday morning.
After that, it’s off to Medomak Camp in Washington ME for a week of family, friends and astronomy!

Image via Wikipedia

More than 500 people gathered this weekend at Boston University’s Sherman Center for WordCamp Boston 2011. What is WordCamp? It’s an annual forum for sharing, learning, influencing and talking about WordPress, the free web publishing tool that’s so easy you can have a website up and running for as little as $6 in a couple of hours.

WordPress boasts some impressive statistics – Worldwide there are more than 4,500,000 WordPress-powered sites, and 99,700 of them, or almost 10%, are in the top 1 million rated sites. At ‘only’ 1.6 million sites, Joomla is the nearest competitor.

I’ve learned some tools and concepts that have potential to make a significant difference for many amateur and professional astronomers. Here’s a tool that’s easy to use, free or really cheap, and can help promote our hobby/vocation/passions in Astronomy, Telescope Making or frankly whatever floats your boat that you want to share with an audience.

This site, ScopeMaker.com has used WordPress for almost 2 years. About 1 year ago I set up a site for the Clay Center Observatory using WordPress, and my artist wife Donna Berger is converting her site from a pure HTML to WordPress site. Major upgrades on in WordPress’ future, and I hope to follow them and utilize new technologies like CSS3 and HTML 5 in the coming months.