I was very excited to start our section on Astronomy because I love everything about the universe. There is so much to find out in space and it is crazy to realize how much could actually be floating around out there. Astronomy has a lot more to do with observations than experiments, I mean how are we supposed to conduct an experiment on, say, Saturn when it takes ten years to get there? :) The cool thing about Astronomy is that there can be so many hypotheses and so many answers to those observations that the discovery of space is never stopped.
In class we were to do a visual presentation with a partner and a powerpoint on the basic ideas in Astronomy. At first the powerpoint seemed like we were just repeating information we already knew; yeah, the sun rises and then the moon and that distinguishes day and night. However, once we got into lunar eclipses and solar eclipses, and tides, and all that extra stuff it got very interesting. I had known of these topics before, but being able to just research them more intently helped me gain a better knowledge of what each was about and why they happened. Not only did this research help, but all the visual representations we did in class were also very helpful. Between the two visuals of the planets (the walk of the planets and the video of traveling past each planet) it really put into perspective how vast everything is out in the galaxy. But out of all the activities we did through our Astronomy exploration I really enjoyed doing the research on my group visual project and seeing others research. It was nice because I learned new facts about topics that I thought I had a lot of knowledge on, and everyone was actually somewhat intrigued by what they found on their topic. The presentations were very exciting to look at, and the fact that we could ask questions and discuss with each other in the class was nice.
All in all, taking a couple trips out in the galaxy was well worth my time!
Oh, and seeing what would happen if I got sucked into a black hole :)
