Immense Telescopes That Sail the Night Above

From Oct. 20-22, the Friends of Arlington's David M. Brown Planetarium hosted their second weekend of the 2017-18 school year titled, “Immense Telescopes that Sail the Night Above”, dedicated to the use of telescopes in astronomy and space exploration. On Friday Sep. 20 there was a premiere of the planetarium’s newest show, “Explore”, followed by a reception. On Saturday Sep. 21, there were more screenings of “Explore”. On Sunday Sep. 22 there was a talk by Dr. HeidiHammel, Executive Vice President of Associated Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), titled “From Hubble to Webb, and Beyond: Exploring with NASA’s Big Space Telescopes”, followed by a viewing of the full dome show “The Accidental Astronaut”.

“Telescopes take things that are really far and bring them close to us,” said Dr. Hammel, opening her Sunday talk at the David M. Brown Planetarium. “A telescope is basically a device for gathering light from things very far away in the sky. It brings them close and magnifies them so that we can see them better.”

“So why would we take one of those telescopes and put it into space? That’s hard to do, and it’s much easier to put a telescope on the ground,” Dr. Hammel continued just before showing the audience a picture of the Hubble Telescope floating above the Earth. She started off her talk with a short chemistry and physics lesson talking to the audience about the properties of light and how placing telescopes like Hubble above the Earth’s atmosphere allows for more accurate viewing of objects in space: including stars, planets, and galaxies. She further discussed how we can detect and identify elements found here on Earth in other parts of space using their light properties. She then transitioned into some of the intriguing images captured by Hubble over its lifetime. Among them were the “Eagle Nebula” and the stars being born within it, the “Cat’s Eye Nebula”, and the “Ant Nebula”. These were just a few of many.

“No one has ever has ever built this kind of thing before. You can’t buy it at Wal-Mart,” Dr. Hammel said introducing the new James Webb Space Telescope. “It’s scary and it’s risky, but that’s what we do.”

The final part of Dr. Hammel’s talk consisted of a look at the new James Webb Telescope which will be positioned much farther away from the Earth than Hubble. In addition to sharing pictures of the Webb Telescope to let audience see how massive it is, Dr. Hammel also showed a video produced by Northrup Grumman showing how the James Webb telescope will unfold piece by piece as it travels to its to final destination, an L2 orbit around the Sun. She concluded with a discussion of NASA’s plans to launch a third telescope well after Hubble and Webb, telling the children in the audience that their generation would send this third telescope into space to do, among other things, characterize planets in other stars similar to Earth.

The Friends will host special events at the David M. Brown Planetarium one weekend every month until the end of the school year. Each weekend will be geared towards increasing STEM education/awareness for all ages and will feature a specific theme. For more information, visit the Friends’ website: http://friendsoftheplanetarium. The theme of November’s weekend will be: Lunar Wonders.

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