No 155: It is called SPACE for a reason….

I am not a real man. I can’t fix shelves, I don’t know (or care) how the combustion engine works, and I have no opinion on the best driving route from Basingstoke to Cheltenham on a Sunday afternoon. I have long been content to lack these  masculine traits. However, sometimes just sometimes my failings come back to haunt me. As the Assistant Scout Leader for my local troop I was recently asked to lead some badge work. I find backwoods survival skills frustrating (‘just use a match!’) and I am hopeless at anything that requires hand/eye coordination (such as archery). This significantly narrows my field of badges.

Earlier this year I had successfully enthralled the troop with my one party piece: a session on water and wastewater treatment (see Notes 123 and 124). Unfortunately the troop foolishly concluded this meant I possessed hidden depths of knowledge. My protestations to the contrary were seen as modesty. If only they knew the truth. Mrs Clark could have told them just how useless I am.

Faced with the challenge of finding something that would engage and educate yet not be too practical I eventually decided upon the Astronomy badge. Over the course of the next 5 weeks I will attempt to engage twenty-five 10 – 14 year olds in the majesty of the universe. Week 1 went surprisingly well.

In order to see how much the children knew already I invited each patrol to act out how the sun, earth and moon interact with each other. With the possible exception of when the Earth kicked the Moon because his flailing arms were getting too close, their basic level of knowledge was higher than I had expected. They could even name all the planets (obligatory schoolboy laughter at Uranus). Perhaps most worrying was when I asked the other three other leaders to act out the ‘right answer’. They ended up in a confused huddle in the corner of the room. On the plus side between them they could cook a delicious three course meal in the Arctic with just two pieces of wood and a bag of broccoli.  

Next, using a football (200mm diameter) as the sun, I got the scouts to select from an array of smaller spherical objects (ping pong balls, tennis balls, etc) those which they felt best represented each of the planets in our solar system. As expected everyone chose objects too large. There was a lovely jaw drop moment when I revealed that, on this scale, the earth was just a tiny bead (2mm across) and our biggest planet, Jupiter, was nothing more than a small cherry tomato (16mm in diameter).

My final exercise was to give them a sense of the massive distances across space. Taking turns each child placed the Bead Earth and the Tomato Jupiter at appropriate distances from our Football Sun. With each attempt I confirmed if they were better or worse than the previous guess. Inevitably we ended up outside. With our football sun balanced precariously on the gate we started walking up the road. At 21 meters we positioned our Earth in orbit. It was another 185m before the Cherry Tomato was finally positioned correctly. Had we wanted to place Neptune it would have involved another half kilometre of walking. Our solar system really is huge.

As a final question I asked the scouts where, on this scale, would our next nearest star (Alpha Centuri) be? The guesses came thick and fast. In the High Street? By the train station? Eventually one of the more exuberant children who has a natural tendency to misbehave and is invariably being chastised for being disruptive, chirped up with the biggest distance he could imagine: FINLAND! Imagine his delight at learning he was the nearest. On the scale where our sun is a football, Alpha Centuri would be 5200km away.

Next week: Telescopes!

These Notes and previous editions can be found at http://notesfrompiers.blogspot.co.uk/