MBO was honoured to have the first PhD student to graduate from the observatory back when Monash University ran it, Dr Len Halprin, come back and pay a visit – with his current students from Sandringham College. “It’s like coming full circle,” he commented. He graduated around the time the old wooden 16″ telescope was […]
The Outreach team had a massive month of events in August 2019. Nearly half the month had something on! We did: 7 scout groups 2 interest groups (adults) 1 private booking 1 Public Viewing night 1 Fashion shoot 1 Film shoot for Prof. Alan Duffy 2 off-site events – one at McCleland Sculpture Park and […]
The seasons are changing here on Earth as we approach the September Equinox, but have you ever considered that other planets might have seasons? Or not? And which ones? Did you know seasons on Uranus last 21 years? These were all thing that the Novae group explored at the September session. The older Supernovae group […]
A damp start to the evening turned into a wet night so we weren’t able to get any telescopes out this month. Instead we learnt about Voyager 2’s flyby of Neptune, as it will the 30th anniversary of that on the 25th of August, and it was also launched during August 1977. We also took […]
The sky was clear on a Young Observers night for the first time since April so we celebrated by opening the Monash dome and pointing the big 18” telescope at Jupiter and Saturn for everyone to enjoy. We also learnt about the Apollo mission spacecraft and how they got to the Moon and back 50 […]
This month we took a look at the basic life cycle of stars. This included a video with a song about the birth of stars, and a worksheet with a word-find puzzle that showed the two paths stars are likely to take; the one our Sun is on, heading towards puffing up into a red […]
We had rebel fighters, we had Darth Vaders and Boba Fett came looking for Han Solo, but he was off making the Kessel run in under 12 parsecs during our Star Wars themed Young Observers night. So we had a lesson on how to measure parallax of stars so we could determine their distance from […]
The weather was kind to us for our April meeting but only a small group of Novae gathered (it was the start of school holidays) to finish off some work on the Periodic table. We tried an introduction to spectra, matching some mystery spectra to their elements. That’s how we find out what things are […]
Unfortunately the March meeting did not go ahead. Firstly we cancelled on the 2nd of March due to the dangerous fire conditions and the ongoing Bunyip National Park fire event, then the following week smoke from the fire filled the air and made a breathing hazard. On to April!
It was great to see so many familiar faces back at Young Observers on Saturday to start the year off, and we also welcomed some new ones. We weren’t able to do any viewing with telescopes because of daylight savings but we still had plenty to talk about. There was the news from over the […]
