The pleasing planetarium - a short essay

June 2017

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious days!

The pleasing planetarium – a short essay

The amazing Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium, we went to on educational trip on 20th June which was provided by our school, Sri Kumaran Children’s Home. At first, we were left to play in the enrapturing science park. In the distinct experiments we saw, I had favoured a few of them.

·                     The kaleidoscope contained different mirrors and glasses, enthralling the ones who peeped through.

·                      The whispering domes were a pair of slightly domed structures that had a ring attached to it. The colossal domes were placed on two sides of the park. When spoken through one dome, the person on the other end could hear it and talk back.

·                     The musical pipes were different sized rods that made the sounds of the eight musical notes.

·                     The noise resonators were pipes of different lengths through which different whispering sounds were heard. Smaller the pipe, shriller the sound was heard.

After we discovered the park, we were all set to watch the prepossessing sky theatre.

Settling down, we made ourselves comfortable on the soft chairs and leant back to watch the projections of the night sky. ‘Exploring the Universe’ it was titled and we enjoyed every bit of it. We later came back, looking at models. The one that intrigued me the most was the Samrat Yantra, the largest sundial in the world.

 I learnt from the Sky Theatre:

·                    In 1609, Galileo made his first telescope which enabled him to discover many heavenly bodies in the night sky. 

·                    There are 88 constellations identified till date

·                    A great circle on the celestial sphere representing the sun's apparent path during the year, so called because lunar and solar eclipses can only occur when the moon crosses it. During the show, we found out that there is an inclination of the solar system

·                    Galileo was under indefinite house arrest till his death in 1642 because he supported the theory that the Sun was in the middle of the solar system (heliocentrism) and opposed to the theory that the Earth was in the centre of the solar system (geocentrism). He went blind in the year 1638.

·                    Galileo had discovered only Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. It was only later when Uranus and Neptune were both discovered.

·                    The 1995 spacecraft sent to Jupiter was named after Galileo Galilei. It focused on researching Jupiter and it moons - Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.