Flights Not Fancy

AEROSPACE ENGINEERS: This afternoon, we continued to work through the pile of swag we brought home from the Seattle Science Festival Expo day. We decided today's focus would be aircraft construction.

First, the kids tackled a wooden glider. We've all seen lots of gliders like these before, but these were a tad bit different in that they were extraordinarily brittle.
Let's just day, CJ and Annbelle each ended up snapping the cockpits off and other such airline disasters. Be glad they don't work for Boeing.

The styrofoam shuttle-ish thingee went together better. Perhaps not surprisingly, it flew better, as well.

Here they are having a dogfight ... watch out, Laika! Annabelle's errant plane is headed your way!

STARGAZING:  Last week, thanks to a tip from a friend, I subscribed to the daily EarthSky.org email list. It has proved to be a great source of information. For instance, in yesterday's update, I learned that Saturn and Spica would be visible near the moon that night, just after dusk.

So, I waited impatiently for the sun to set (it takes awhile this time of year) and then ran outside about every three minutes to see what I could see.

I spotted Spica, the brightest star in the constellation Virgo, first.  The blue giant that's the 15th brightest star in our night sky was just right of the moon. (Today I learned that Spica is actually a close binary star, with its components so close, in fact, they can't be individually identified even through a powerful telescope. Spica's components orbit around each other every four days. Fascinating!)

Annabelle missed the action, but CJ was still awake and happy to get out of bed to do a little stargazing.

BILLIONAIRE:  We're still keeping tabs on Curiosity, of course. The Martian rover has been roaming around on the Red Planet for more than 10 months now. Today, NASA shared a composite image that was made from 900 photos MSL has taken on Mars. The photo is over a billion eye-popping pixels, Yowza!  The images used were taken on several different Mars days between Oct. 5 and Nov. 16, 2012.

The image may not look that compelling here, but what you need to do is view it online. It's available for perusal with pan and zoom tools at http://mars.nasa.gov/bp1/.  Make sure you click on some of the thumbnails there, they're really interesting.

IKEA ENGINEERS: This afternoon, we FINALLY stopped by IKEA to get a much-needed bookcase for Annabelle's 'new' room. We settled on an EXPEDIT. It's been awhile since I've transformed an IKEA product from flat pack to furniture.  But the familiar confusion, sweating and swearing all came cascading back to me.

Happily, in the end, it went together, and it's holding a bazillion books in Annabelle's room already. I think we need another one.

PLUCKIN' AND STRUMMIN': During our regular 30-ish minute workout routine, we choose different playlists from YouTube to have as a soundtrack. Today, we went with Dan Zanes, a musician who has recorded a number of wonderful children's albums (though they're highly listenable for all ages, believe you me).

A lot of the time as we're going through our motions, we can't see the screen, and at one point today, it sounded like Dan was giving a guitar lesson. This picqued our curiosty, and it turns out he's recorded and posted a series of teaching videos called "Dan Zanes Family Band Workshop." The video we came across today was  for a catchy, call-and-answer gospel tune, "Up Above My Head."

We're definitely going to have to give that a go on the kids' guitars, and check out the other videos in that series.