Telescope Reviews: Sunspotter Experiences!

Total number of children - 27

The Sunspotter was used as part of a Project AstroBio (http://www.astro.washington.edu/projAstroBio/) presentation to the Cottage Lake Elementary 5th grade class on May 23, 2003. We had about an hour with which to view the sun before high clouds started to cause problems.

The class was separated into 5 groups so each group could discuss what was being observed. The first thing talked about was safe sun viewing. After going over the safety issues, we talked about how to aim the Sunspotter at the sun and, once the sun was centered, we spent the first few minutes just
letting the students look and talk among themselves.

We covered the same set of questions with each group, asking them to describe what they saw, talking about why the image moved, what direction it was moving, how would they draw the image, etc. The book that comes with the Sunspotter had a good set of questions with which to start discussions.
A couple of the groups had very thin clouds that caused the image to change, but they quickly figured out why that happened.

The first three groups had clear skies to work with but the last two had to work with some thin clouds. They were only able to view the sun for a couple of minutes so we were able to spend some extra time talking about what they saw.

It seemed like all the students had a good time viewing the sun, some of them were surprised at the sunspots and also at how fast the sun's image moved. The Sunspotter is a good instrument with which a group can observe the sun. Group discussion was much more animated than if we would have been using a telescope. For group presentations the Sunspotter is recommended.

We would like to thank Cloudy Nights for the opportunity to demo the Sunspotter!

Howard Halter
Pacific Northwest Orienteering - http://www.pnwo.org/
Project AstroBio - http://www.astro.washington.edu/projAstroBio/

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