SOUTHWORTH PLANETARIUM70 Falmouth Street Portland, Maine 04103
ASTRONOMY A LA CARTE # 2: SOLAR SYSTEM
Monday, October 1, 2018
7:00 - 8:30 p.m.
Well, didn't we trip the mind fantastic last Monday night! Any of the wonderful students who attended the first ever "Astronomy a la Carte" class on September 24th would tell you without hesitation that the class was one of the five most exciting events of their entire evening. The first destination in our 12 week cosmic odyssey conveyed us to the moon, the closest of all celestial objects to Earth. (There are currently about 138,799,000,138,298,823, 903, 638 ,113,984 of those accursed things. As about 40,000 stars are born every New York second around the Universe, this number changes as fast as the 3450 AD population clock. Or, as fast as we assume the clock will increasing around the year that the human race will be procreating so prodigiously as to be a mind-melded flesh sphere expanding off Earth's surface at 0.06% light speed.)
On Monday night we propel off the lunar shores toward the wonder worlds beyond. Hypermanic Mercury; Super Hot Venus; Water Drenched Earth, Devil-Eyed Mars; Monstrously Massive Jupiter, Exquisitely Beautiful Saturn, Unfortunately Named Uranus, Sea Governing Neptune, and, Poor, Put Upon Pluto which is still a planet despite the pronouncements of the International Astronomical Union. Add to these spinning orbs a smattering of deep space comets, a veritable armada of tumbling asteroids; and let's not neglect the solar centerpiece that contains more than 99% of all the solar system's matter. Encircle it with the Kuiper belt; add heliosphere bubble wrap and enclose it all in a series of Oort Cloud shells extending into the depthless hollows of interstellar space. The result is a bejeweled spectacle of blinding lights, vibrant worlds and a shooting gallery of flotsam that roars through the galaxy at 500,000 miles an hour! Tell me that is not the best place to live in this entire Universe. (Well, if you don't feel the same way, you're out of luck. Clever marketing people have convinced Alpha Centaurians that uncooked humans are a natural aphrodisiac so we can't exactly run there in a huff.)
Did you miss the first class?
Or, did you attend the first class and for some reason you want to return?
You and yours are welcome to attend the second. All you need to do is report to the Southworth Planetarium by 7:05 p.m on Monday night. (Please do this, also, even if you've already paid for the whole course.) At 7:05 p.m, we will depart en masse for the enormous classroom 165 Science. At 8:00 p.m. we'll then return en masse to the Star Dome Theatre to watch a solar system show in our subterranean star dome theater.
As these classes are not continuous, you may attend any or all of them.
$12 for one person $20 for two people.
We look forward to seeing you join our merry band of intrepid galactic adventurers. We guarantee the experience will have about a 0.0005% chance of being life transforming