Astronomy

Recently, my science class has been studying astronomy. We are learning about all the planets, the sun, and nebula. Last week, our class was assigned a project. We are required to build a model of the solar system. Therefore, that is what I have been working on lately. I am making it out of a few different things. I am using some Styrofoam balls, a Styrofoam board, skewer sticks, rubber balls, and clay. I'm still not sure how it's going to look when I'm finished, but it will hopefully look great. I'll take a photo of it when I am finished with it since it is a work in progress. Speaking of astronomy, that was actually what I was reading up on this summer. I attempted to stargaze a few nights but that is kind of hard to do when there are so many lights turned on around you and when you're not supposed to be outside in the middle of the night. However, I still did get to see some stars. You can see the short record that I kept of what I saw during the summer below.

August 23, 2010: It's been a great stargazing night. I think I have spotted the Summer Triangle. I also think a saw part of the constellation Scorpius. I also spotted a few other stars, but I can't really tell what they are. I think I saw just about everything that the website, Stardate said to be visible tonight. It is nice and cool outside tonight. (I use a website called Stardate which usually tells me what will be visible in the night sky during the week. Here's the link if you're interested: http://stardate.org/nightsky/weekly.php)
August 24, 2010: Tonight I observed the full moon, a constellation, and a bunch of other stars. I saw many more than usual since I actually went outside tonight with my mom.
September 15, 2010: I haven't really been stargazing since I am going to school again, but I have been watching the moon lately and I have been watching this star in the eastern horizon that seems to be moving farther away ever night. It's a sign that autumn is coming. Good bye Summer Triangle. (Note: What I saw was not actually a star, my friend told me that it was actually a couple of planets that were close together. They were Jupiter and some other planet that I can't remember.)

These were the books that I read during the summer. The Stargazing Year was a really interesting nonfiction book about a guy named Charles Laird Calia who built a backyard observatory. I read half of The Planets by Dava Sobel. It mostly just gave me information about the planets and their names, but it wasn't really that interesting to me.
This is a photo that I took probably around the time that school started. I just found it really amazing for the moon to be on the western horizon extremely close to a star that I look for every night. The moon is hardly ever there, so that is why I took this photo. It's not great quality especially since I took this from my window.
This is just one of many pictures I took of my cat. She kept me company on most nights while I was stargazing.