Recent Planetarium Shows at Science Festivals

Trying to catch up on some observatory updates after all the education programmes and events that have been going on since the start of the new school term at the end of June.

We've just finished a week of Kids Science Fest, as part of the Singapore Science Festival, where amongst activities such as light painting and marble machines, we also conducted six planetarium shows a day inside our STARLAB portable planetarium.

 These planetarium sessions are normally available for bookings by school and kindergarten groups but this is the second time we've used the STARLAB at this event, in addition to a two week period during the December holidays last year.


The system uses a popular astronomical software called Starry Night, which displays a virtual image of the sky via a projector on the inside of the inflatable dome. The projector is equipped with a fisheye lens to create a 360 degree view of the entire sky.

We actually have another planetarium that we take out of Science Centre to schools as part of our outreach programme. Last month, we visited Anderson Secondary School and Victoria Junior College.

This older more basic system, uses a halogen light bulb and series of projecting cylinders, each of which has a fixed number for images, for examples e.g constellations.

Here we are set up on a sheltered basketball court at Anderson Secondary, as part of their local cluster science day event, which involves a number of other schools from the around the same area.

Ideally, these portable domes should be placed in a indoor, air conditioned venue. However, due to limited space at the school, we opted for this semi-outdoor area, which although sheltered from Sun, was still very warm and stuffy inside the dome as warm outside air is continually blown in to the dome to keep it inflated.

A few days later we were at VJC, for a similar Science day event for east zone schools. We've attended this event for the past few years and set up in our regular venue, the AVA Lecture Theatre. There's just enough room on the small stage to squeeze in the fully inflated dome ad there's air-con too!!!

It has crossed my mind to set up an inflatable planetarium at the observatory, on several occasions during Friday night stargazing, however, we're a bit short on space as well as manpower. A more permanent planetarium may be the answer, but that may take sometime to become a reality, we'll see what we can do.

New Toys

Recently, I've been on the lookout for new models and props related to astronomy that can be used in some of our school programmes, like are planetarium shows and large group demonstrations. During a search on the internet I came across a large scale inflatable solar system.
At first it looked like it was only available on overseas websites like Amazon but later I found a local supplier here in Singapore, The Learning Store/Expenovate.

The next day I went down there to take look, and bought the last two sets of their current stock. I intend to use one set for  some interactive play during the introduction to our planetarium programme for preschoolers. Currently I'm using a series of Styrofoam balls and marbles to illustrate the location and size of the planets in the solar system, the inflatable planets however are much more visually appealing and you can bounce them around.



The second set will be ideal for my upcoming talk on "the planets" for the NLB, which I'll be conducting as apart of their astronomy month at Jurong East Library on Saturday 2nd June.

Back at Science Centre,  the solar systems attracted quite alot of attention from my fellow scobbers and colleagues who were in the office at the time. Kin Guan and myself set about inflating the planets inside our cubicle area using the supplied footpump, which made a loud high pitch sound every time we stepped on it. One of our colleagues found this particularly disturbing, as it is similar to the sound of scratching a blackboard with your fingernails (does anyone still use blackboards?), something known to send shivers down your spine, although I think my colleague used the phrase "makes me resonate" :/

We inflated the rest of the planets in the walkway outside and once finished brought them back into the office where several others contributed other ways of using them, like attempting to spin each planet on one finger.

The inflatable solar system is a nice set for visual demonstrations and explaining the solar system layout, however the sizes are not to scale, although the gas planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune) are quite close.
Of course the Sun is so big its hard to represent its true size.  Sometimes I will still use marbles and Styrofoam balls to represent the size of the rocky planets like Earth, Mars, Venus and Mercury, which are incredibly small compared to the gas giants.

I guess its hard to find a really accurate solar system model because of the large variation in size, not to mention the huge distances between the planets.

As often happens when shopping, you sometimes come back with more than you intended to buy. Likewise, whilst at the learning store I also picked up these colourful posters which I thought would be nice to display inside the observatory: