Anticipating April 8th's solar eclipse, be sure to attend the NJAAPT workshop Saturday morning March 2nd at Sperry Observatory on the campus of Union College in Cranford NJ.
Take home viewing glasses for your students plus a make-and-take sunspotter, get a tour of the domes and telescopes, be prepped by Dr. Mary Lou West from Montclair University and AAI to guide your students' experience, and enjoy breakfast refreshments.
Registration is open to NJAAPT members and also our colleague science teachers from NJ and beyond. The cost of this event is $10 payable online at registration, to defray expenses.
We have a good supply of eclipse viewing glasses to give out for your students to use.
A sunspotter is a pinhole camera with screen for safe indirect eclipse viewing. These retail for around $200, but in about 20 minutes we'll each make a cereal box DIY sunspotter that your students can recreate in class or at home. For this project please bring at least one medium/large cereal box. We'll provide tools and other supplies such as a scissors, masking tape, white card stock for projection screen, paper trimmer, heavy aluminum foil, aluminum duct tape for light sealing, compass with narrow point for making pinholes, ruler, pencils. You might bring some of these to help speed the work. Click here for a YouTube link that illustrates cereal box DIY sunspotter construction.
We'll be meeting inside the Sperry Observatory, in a lecture/classroom space. Amateur Astronomers Inc. (AAI) which is the volunteer group that operates Sperry Observatory and the telescopes, and also opens the facility to the public most Friday nights, looks forward to providing us with a brief tour of the facility.
For more information on our presenter Dr. Mary Lou West please click here. Depending on time and interests of the group, Dr. West suggests discussing solar eclipse types and history, eclipse sun-moon-Earth geometry, solar features and activity, sun-viewing techniques and safety, lunar influences on Earth, comets, and effective demos and pedagogy for these topics.