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30/9/24
Winchester Science Centre
At the end of this week World Space Week begins! This year it starts on Friday 4th October and ends on Friday 10th October. Learning about space is super fun, but tricky to do as you can’t go there yourselves. But there are places around the country you can go to find out more about space. One of those is Winchester Science Centre, with its interactive space exhibit and amazing planetarium.
Winchester Science Centre has two main interactive exhibitions, a general science area and then a space one too. Its space exhibit is called Explorer: Space and it is an interactive and fun way to learn lots about space. My favourite part of Explorer: Space was the giant 3D sphere that you could change into any planet in the Solar System or the Sun, Moon or the Milky Way, or at least the view you get of it from Earth. There was a giant version of Google Earth, which was fun to explore and lots of interactive activities and information about space, such as galaxies, the solar system, space missions, different types of rock, what it is like for humans up in space and lots more.
But my favourite part of my day was definitely watching the Solar System Adventure Live show in the planetarium. In the show I learnt so much information, the presenter knew so much about space, it was really interesting! The show started off telling you all about the night sky and the stars you can see and then explained all about the constellations which was amazing. Then we went for a tour of the whole Solar System where we learnt lots about all the planets, dwarf planets, moons and the Sun.
Planetarium Constellations
Planetarium Constellations
My Top Facts I learnt at Winchester Science Centre
1. On Uranus and Neptune it is raining diamonds, or so it is thought! Not a lot is known for definite about these planets, as they are so far away from us on Earth but it is thought that diamonds actually rain from the sky…amazing!
2. From Earth we only ever see one side of the Moon. This is because the Moon spins around itself in the same time it takes to orbit Earth. We only know what the other side of the Moon looks like from photos taken by an unmanned spacecraft in 2009.
3. Humans could probably last in the vacuum of space without a spacesuit for up to 90 seconds.
4. You can spot the International Space Station from Earth. It will look like an aeroplane but won’t change direction or have flashing lights, or you might think it looks like very bright star moving across the sky but it won’t disappear like a ‘shooting star’.
5. A Meteoroid is an icy or rocky object in space, up to one metre wide. A Meteor is a ‘shooting star’ you might see in the sky where an object is burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere. A Meteorite is an object that has survived travelling through Earth’s atmosphere and lands on the ground.
6. Sirius is the brightest star that we can see in the night sky but you can usually only spot it during the winter. It is the bottom star from the constellation called Orion the Hunter.
7. There are different types of galaxy, sorted based on the type of shape they are. At the Winchester Science Centre I learnt about Spiral, Barred Spiral, Elliptical and Irregular galaxies.
8. The Andromeda Galaxy is our nearest galaxy and is the most distant object we can see with our eyes from Earth, without using any special equipment.
9. You can see Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn as well from Earth, without the need for a telescope, although its often hard to tell the difference between the stars and the planets without one!
10. Mars is the only planet humans have a chance at visiting. Mercury is too close to the sun, on Venus it is even hotter, plus you would get crushed and burned by the atmosphere. The other planets are incredibly far away and are also gas giants with no surface to stand on! It is hoped astronauts will make it to Mars, but first they will hopefully be going back to the Moon next year…won’t that be exciting!
I would really recommend visiting Winchester Science Centre, it was a great day out and perfect if you are interested in science and particularly if like me you love learning about space. I would like to say a special thank you to the staff, who were so kind and helpful…and very knowledgeable! The Science Show Live and the Solar System Adventure Live Planetarium Show were definitely the highlights of my day. And to the lovely staff who let us take some photos of inside the planetarium after the show…thank you so much. It was really appreciated! (We didn’t use our camera during the show!)
Winchester Science Centre would be the perfect place for a family day out (book more than 7 days in advance and the tickets are 25% cheaper, which makes it feel like a more reasonable price for a day out!) and ideal for a school trip. For school groups you can also book discovery workshops that sound really good. If you can’t make it to the centre to learn about space you can also organise a mobile planetarium to visit your school, which is absolutely brilliant fun and also very much recommended too!
All photos and illustrations in this blog post are Whizzbots Images.
Other images on the site may be Public Domain, Shutterstock or Creative Commons Images, which are credited appropriately.