Our Vulcan Neighbors

FASCINATING:  We subscribe the Library of Congress' daily email from their Teaching with the Library of Congress blog. I heartily recommend it to anyone/everyone, as many treasures are contained within, and they're handily delivered to your inbox! They're often based on a 'this day/week/month' in history type of thing, but sometimes they're just wonderfully random. Like today's missive! It shared with us a diagram from 1864 of the solar system, for use by students.

One thing we noted right away is that Pluto was still a planet. Yes!! Long live Pluto!!  However, when you look more closely, you see other 'planets' that stop and make you go, 'Hmm.' Like, say, 'planets' Vesta, Juno, Ceres and Pallas. Oh, and Vulcan. Yes, Vulcan! Be still my Star Trek lovin' heart! :)

If you look closely at the diagram, you'll see Vulcan orbiting the sun even closer than Mercury. The scientific thought back then was that based on the orbit of Mercury, astronomers surmised there was another planet between it and our Sun.  I used this as an opportunity to point out to CJ and Annabelle that countless times throughout history, those in the know have supposedly figured 'it' out, only to have 'it' proven completely wrong down the road. (That whole, 'The Earth is flat' thing comes to mind.)

The point of the blog today was that the diagram was made at a point when astronomers kept discovering so many 'planets' that they rebooted, and made more stringent requirements about what constitutes a planet. It's all so very interesting, isn't it?

At the end of the article, which CJ and Annabelle both read, it said, "You might have noticed that the names of most of these solar system objects have a common origin. Try to identify that origin, and speculate about why the objects have the names they do, instead of being named after their creators or other people or places."

It was a great jump off point for the kids to pursue some independent research, which they each did with enthusiasm. Super cool!

HISTORY BUFFS: A couple days back, I posted about the Big History Project going online, wide open to the general public. Per its Internet front page, "Big history is a story everyone should know. It's a universal, scientific origin story that is relevant to anyone and everyone."

Big History Project offers a 9-part course, each with a quiz. If you pass them all, you become "a certified big historian."

Graphic from: BigHistoryProject.com

The kids worked their way through the first three parts of the course today, and passed the tests with flying colors. Yay! They're 1/3 of their way toward being 'big historians,' certified, no less!

TORCH BEARERS: Tonight, a Soyuz lifted off from the Baikonur, Kazakhstan, with three astro/cosmonauts aboard. Left to right they are 38 Flight Engineer Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, Soyuz Commander Mikhail Tyurin of Roscosmos, and Flight Engineer Rick Mastracchio of NASA. We watched it go down live on NASA TV.

Here's a wonderful photo from NASA's Bill Ingalls of the liftoff.
                       
One of the precious cargo items they were carrying is an Olympic torch.

The torch will be used in a weekend spacewalk, just a few weeks prior to the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia.

TAMALE: We're headed back to the soooooooo-familiar I-5 tomorrow, down south into Oregon to Hillsboro, where the Big Sky conference's season ending soccer tournament is being held.

I've loaded the car with lots of homework for the kids, and we're looking forward to watching their cousin Torie play for Portland State University's soccer team. Today, we made a couple dozen custom cookies for the occasion. Go Viks!