Last Night Was A Magic Tree House Space Mission

Just kidding. Last night I went to the Robert Wollman Planetarium at King High School. The Planetarium is very old, I talking 49 years old. When a person walks in they immediately notice the actual Planetarium, the machine that projects the night skies onto the dome ceiling, looks like iron probe to be used under the ocean or something like such. The Planetarium has weekly digital video showings that fit on the dome ceiling. This was not my first visit. I came by a year ago and watched a video on colors. The seats are reclined slightly and aligned in a circle, so there is no direct place of screen to look.

I watched a video on space adventures of little kids learning about space. Most of the information in the video I already knew. The video was aiming towards children in grade school or middle school.

Afterwards was more enjoyable. I was able to catch the director of the planetarium and ask her lots of questions. Some questions were about the planetarium, other about how I could personally get involved since Astronomy is my choice of study.

I asked about what classes, schools, or groups go and enjoy the planetarium. She told me that the Physics, World Geography, Spanish, and Biology classes enjoy video showings at the planetarium. This is because different videos that are shown are about many different aspects of science. So, I figured it's not exactly the Space science that invites classes in, but the well-rounded bits of knowledge the classes can obtain out of the videos. The concepts are related to their class studies and have it connected to other topics of study.
She also talked about how elementary school classes will take annual field trips to the Planetarium. She said that when she displays the night skies, the kids are wide-eyed and oohing and awing. She explains that in Corpus, we never see many stars. We can see the moon, Venus, maybe the Big Dipper and Orion constellations. We for sure never see the Milky Way. The students love the Planetarium, for they get to see the entire night sky.
It was such a nice experience even though the planetarium was just large enough to fit about two classes of students. This small planetarium still brings the public and students to a place of science. That is enough to keep me happy about how much my city is interested in science.