My trip to the planetarium

Inside the Planetarium

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    This last Tuesday, I took a trip to the Clark Planetarium. I had been there only once before when I was about nine or ten years old and didn't remember a lot about it. I was very excited to go. I first went and played with the moon phase toy. It surprised me that i actually knew the what and why of it. I then meandered over to look at the electrical ball and the cloud machine, which entertained me for a solid forty minutes. 
    I went up stairs to see what else tickled my fancy. What I found was an exhibit about the solar system. It had large models of each planet, scaled to show how big or small one planet is from another. Earth was the size of a baseball compared to Jupiter, but Jupiter didn't even look that big compared to the sun. Even with that, the sun was not even a speck in our galaxy. At that realization, I felt so insignificant and tiny. On the bright side, there were tablets of fun facts about each planet that I had never known before, such as a year on Uranus is equal to 84.01 Earth Years and the reason for Neptune appearing blue in color is because of absorption of red light by methane in its atmosphere. I turned around and saw the scale that told you how much you would weigh on other planets and I couldn't resist. I found out I weighed seventeen ounces on an asteroid, over a billion pounds on this other star, a couple thousand pounds on our sun, and only fifteen pounds more than i do now on mars. 
    There were some quizes on the planets and galaxies that I didn't do too well on, so I moved on to the Moon and Mars scene. I have seen some movies that have shown the surface of the two, but it was really interesting to see what the surface of them might actually look like. I looked at all of the space rocks that they had on display there, the one I liked the most was the one that is four point five million years old. I didnt get to see a show because they were closing, but I enjoyed my visit there and I was shocked at the fact that I know most of what I was talking about.