5.1.11: Learning astronomy

S is now interested in astronomy and outer space, after having been to Planetarium Negara and Planetarium Melaka. Without me asking him, he can name the various planets' name. Yesterday, he used different types of containers to outline circles to draw planets. He wanted to do planet craft yesterday, but there wasn't time, so I told him that we could do it the next day. I got him to draw a picture of the Sun instead. We looked at some pictures of the sun on the internet, and I was quite surprised to find that the sun's colours are mostly reddish-orange. "This sun is blue" S said pointing to a blue sun.

Today, he told me that he wanted to do planets craft. I went online to look for some crafts but couldn't find any suitable ones. He asked me to do a Mars rover after looking at this website. So, I printed out a picture of the Mars rover and tried to make it from the recyclable materials that we had around the house.

Source: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA04413

Here's what I came up with. Haha!

I also came across a picture of planets. They were in the correct size in the solar system. I printed them out, then cut it. S stuck the pictures in order on the wall above his bed. The Sun is not the correct size, but I didn't have a larger paper than that. I'll have to get a larger paper to draw the sun.

The planets according to scale, except for the sun. The sun is much larger than that.

After that, I read to him about the Sun and Mercury. Then he viewed some youtube videos on planets. He prefers to look at the planet size comparison on youtube. When I watched this video, I was shocked to find that the size of earth (12,756 km( in diameter is very small in relation to the sun (1,392,000 km). And our sun pales in comparison to other larger planets such as the following:
Sirius:                 2,335,000 km
Vega:                 4,315,000 km
Pollux:              11,120,000 km
Arcturus:           22,101,000 km
Aldebaran:        59,770,000 km
Rigel:                97,300,000 km
Deneb:            201,550,000 km
Pistol Star:       450,520,000 km
Betelgeuse:      903,500,000 km
Antares:        1,330,000,000 km
VV Cephaei:  2,644,800,000 km

Earth is tiny indeed!