Waving at the International Space Station

As regular readers will know, we are really keen to get our students at Luna into the reading habit, and creating independent thinkers & travellers of the mind. I think it is really important to enjoy what you are reading, and that it means something to you.                                                                                                                I was thrilled we managed a stellar "Eureka" moment last night with a group of extremely chuffed Eigonauts! Having finished their first choice readers (action packed stories) the last one in the bag was "In the Sky". Potentially a bit dull & flat - except we have an incredible resource just outside the front door!                                                                                                                                        During our previous lesson we'd talked about planets & stars, constellations too; we'd spotted Orion easily and noticed the half moon from the car park. Tonight's mission was time critical (and weather). My satellite tracking app told me it'd appear on the southern horizon at 18:32, giving us 8 minutes before the end of class to spot the International Space Station. My girls were watching the countdown while we did a few other tasks, and coordinated with our classmate in Nagano - via Zoom - what we were going to do & how (needed to use my iPad to "take the class for a walk!").                                                                                                                                                                                                            First of all we found Orion again, and tried to spot Gemini. We had watched a short NASA video

constellation identification

explaining the constellations in view in March, but we could not see Castor or Pollux. The moon was hiding brightly, behind BigBoy (restaurant next door) which was also very lit up, making our view west & south somewhat obscured. Next, we realised the buildings in front of us hid the horizon, and from the app we could see the ISS was going to keep fairly low as it tracked westwards over Utsugushigahara.                                                                                            We dashed upstairs and turned all the lights off, stepped onto the roof (safely!) and were immediately able to see the bright white dot moving across the dark sky exactly where the teacher said it would be! The girls realised that if they might be able to see it again in an hour & a half, it must be going very fast indeed! I asked them if they thought the seven astronauts would be waving back ("probably not, it's dinner time" they decided!)...but they kept waving frantically anyway :)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        And that was about all we had time for, though homework is to draw a picture of the night sky (I found them in the waiting room with the lights off, being very diligent, later!). "Happy?" I asked them. Far from it - they were deliriously chuffed to bits...and so, therefore, is the teacher.

Tracking satellites 

The "AHA!" moment :)

Send me a musical postcard, Shimei!

Listen to various snippets of music, and draw pictures of what comes into your mind. (Today we listened to bits of Holst, Jeff Beck, Peter Gabriel, Carolina Chocolate Drops, Yoshida Brothers, Yen Town Band, Squeeze, Queens of the Stone Age...).

Now, imagine these images are on a postcard, and that you have been on holiday. Connect the images as you describe your amazing vacation!

Dear  Jim

I am in middle of the ocean between UK and US. I crashed into a giant iceberg and my ship is sinking. I’m by myself because I killed everyone on the ship, and I’m heading to Mongolia so no one could find me.

When I crashed to the iceberg, I tried to use a lifeboat to escape, but unluckily I forgot how to use it. The weather was extremely awesome so I think the weather won’t be bad as I’m thinking. So I ran across to US on my bare feet.

In the US, I had no cash, so I stole a cool golden racing car to get to route 66. When I got there, I raced with a funky Lamborghini and a red Russian Ferrari which were controlled by erasers. The erasers had a computer brain which was under control from the space station. When I was racing, a hundred Pусский spies came and asked me if I had a PC eraser. So I said yes, but the next moment a big Russian man poked me with a drum stick, and somehow I woke up in hospital in Okinawa.

Shimei

Space - The Final Frontier

I have a relatively new class on Fridays with two very smart young people, and recently we have been talking about space exploration. We have talked about the space race of the 1960s - from Sputnik's first beeps in orbit to Neil Armstrong's footprints on the moon. This week we talked about Skylab and Mir, and did some work with David Bowie's famous song 'Space Oddity' ("Here, am I floating in my tin can, far above the earth...")

The International Space Station (ISS) is in the news this week because the astronauts from the Shuttle Discovery have had to fix the toilet way up there. We wondered if they were wearing pink rubber gloves - and what would happen if they didn't fix it properly (after all, they can't open a window, can they?!) I asked my students if they'd like to see ISS & Discovery? Rather excited "Yes!!!"

We went to http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/tracking/ and first of all discussed the map. Why was half of it dark? Why was the sun seeming to move? That meant we needed to remember that the earth was actually moving around the sun, and that we are spinning as we go too - once every 24 hours we agreed.

We knew from our book that ISS was probably about 300km "up". We wanted to know how fast it was moving - faster then their mums' cars on the expressway perhaps? A great time to practice big numbers, as the information showed us that ISS was moving at 27,760 km/h. Very surprised looks all round! At that kind of speed, no police car would ever catch you!

Also no way in the world you can see this thing, either, right? Wrong! The ISS is now one of the brightest objects in the night sky. We tapped in our location (nearest one was Tokyo) and realised that at 8.08pm tonight (about 40 minutes after class finished) we should be able to see it for 3 minutes, if we looked ENE (East North-East). How's that for interactive learning?!

So my class scampered off home eagerly awaiting for their homework to arrive, hurtling across the night sky with the space shuttle hanging on to it! R-chan called me later to say thank you - so sweet! - she'd managed to find ISS & Discovery in the sky, exactly where we decided it would be, exactly when we thought it should be there. Now, ends of the week don't get much cooler than that! But if you click here, you can watch ISS on YouTube

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