Planetarium

 Some friends of ours invited us to go to the Palomar Planetarium at the nearby community college last Friday night. The show was only for kids ages 5 and up, so we left Ellie behind with our neighbor.

Honestly, I had fairly low expectations of how interesting the show would be. I thought it could be pretty dry, but boy was I wrong! The show was called "The Sky Tonight" so we saw all the summer constellations that are above us now. The narrator for the night did an awesome job, and the software they use is amazing. At one point we were flying through the solar system and got to look at the ice crystals that make up Saturn's rings. Crazy! The kids' favorite part (and mine too if I'm being honest), was when they shifted our view of the sky from north to south by "spinning the building around." The way the screen rotated, it really did feel like the whole room was spinning. It was cool!

 They also had a couple of telescopes outside. One was a solar telescope, so before the show, the kids got to see the sun. After the show, we got to look through this telescope and see Mars.

We enjoyed our visit so much, we are already talking about going back in six months to see and learn about the winter constellations!