Weekly Mileage #137 and the Observatory Trip

Ocean's ear continues to do well. We're continuing the drops that worked, just to make sure that the infection is completely wiped out.

I went for a run and a hike while Ocean was at preschool Monday morning, then ran some errands. Schools were out that day, so Sunshine's Scout troop scheduled an outing in the afternoon to work on the Citizenship in the Community merit badge. While she was doing that, I took the boys on a hike. Oh, and I felt crummy while doing all this. The drastic temperature change + the time change + a few too many late nights = a head cold for me.

Wednesday we went for a hike at our local trails park.

I can do it!

(after falling off) I'll just do it this way instead

Thursday I went for a bike ride in the basement. Our YM/YW activity that night was centered around missionaries and they asked three returned missionaries to talk about their experiences. They got turned down by all the other sisters they asked (schedule conflicts and such), so I was asked on Wednesday to help out. Not a lot of time to prepare, but also not a lot of time to stress about it.

Friday we skipped playgroup after Ocean's speech therapy appointment. I needed to finish up a post for one of my other blogs and then I had to get ready for a campout with Sunshine.

(he landed fine, I just didn't get a picture of it)

While I was doing that, the washing machine stopped working, so I didn't have all the clean laundry I wanted, but enough for the weekend. Jeremy took it apart Friday evening, but the part he needed isn't going to arrive until Tuesday.

the colored flags are representative of the distances between the sun and the planets- there's more flags further out

Then I drove a car full of girls to Green Bank Observatory in WV for an astronomy merit badge weekend. There were 10 boys and 6 girls age 11-14. Temps were in the 20's, so we were very glad to be staying in the dorm rather than camping (which is an option). We had showers and very hard beds, but we weren't freezing! The main downside was the noise- everything echoed horribly in the dorm and 11 year old boys are not known for being quiet.

the largest telescope is the white framework behind that pointy pine tree left of center. it's pointed up in the picture, so it's harder to get a good view of it.

Green Bank Observatory has radio telescopes, not optical telescopes, but we had a UVA astronomy professor with us who brought one of his optical telescopes, so we were still able to see the craters of the moon Friday night. The observatory has a 40' teaching telescope that they allow the kids to use. They use it to find hydrogen in space, which we were able to see on the receivers. Super cool.

the first radio telescope, built by a guy in the 1930's in his mom's backyard from materials purchased from a hardware store

They have several radio telescopes of various sizes, with the largest being the GBT (Green Bank Telescope or Great Big Thing), which has a surface area of more than 2 acres. Our property is 1.75 acres, for comparison. They run a tour past the telescopes so you can actually get pretty close to it, but it doesn't seem that big, even when you're standing next to it. The GBT is one of the largest moving land structures in the world.

So far, I only have a couple pictures as most of the observatory is a no electronics zone, so we had to use old-fashioned film cameras for pictures. I need to send ours off for developing, then I'll have to scan them in. In the meantime, you can see pictures of the GBT here.

The observatory was built in a valley in the mountains of WV to cut down on radio frequency interference (RFI), but it's also in the National Radio Quiet Zone. This means cell signals and radio frequencies are tightly regulated (or non-existent in some areas), to keep RFI to a minimum.

The observatory offers free Scout weekend programs for Scouts BSA and Girl Scouts so they can work on Astronomy-related badges.

They participate in a variety of hands-on activities, like the teaching telescope I mentioned earlier, but also including working in a computer lab within a giant Faraday cage (to cut down on that pesky RFI) using a program called Stellarium. Free software for identifying and finding constellations, star locations, and so on. Super cool.

screenshot of one way you can use Stellarium- this shows the evening sky as we were meeting for our trip- Saturn, Jupiter and Venus all lined up- which we actually saw in person.

Weekly Mileage
Monday- 1.61 mile trail run
Monday- 2.05 mile hike
Monday- 2.14 mile hike
Wednesday- 1.47 mile hike
Thursday- 10.00 miles biked
total- 17.27 miles

33 hikes towards #52hikechallenge
2.56 kayak miles towards #365milechallenge

127.74 outdoor foot miles towards #365milechallenge
41.16 indoor foot miles towards #365milechallenge
110.0 bike miles towards #365milechallenge
281.46 miles total