BYU Astro Fest

This weekend Aaron and I took the kids to the BYU Astro Fest. I've been wanting to go to this for years, and I wasn't disappointed. We had such a great time. Aaron's parents met us there to join in on the fun.

At the first booth we went to they were handing out pictures taken by the Hubble Telescope. My kids were anxious to take them home and hang them up in their room next to their solar system and map of the International Space Station.

Then we went to another table and made star maps. Basically, it's a wheel that you turn to align the time of year with the time of day (or night as the case may be), and it will show you which stars you should be able to see in the sky, and where they are. I love star maps. I remember making one as a kid and spending countless nights outside on the trampoline looking up at the stars and finding the constellations.

The most exciting part of the day, by far, was building and launching rockets. Our rockets were paper tubes with a piece of foam stuck in the end for a nose, and then the kids got to glue their own tail fins on.

While we waited for the glue to dry on our rockets we went to an audio demonstration. It was really cool, but a bit over the kids' heads. They got restless, so we left early. But they had some really neat examples of how sound works.

Then it was time for blastoff! They were firing out paper rockets off of the end of pvc pipe using an air compressor. I told Aaron to take good notes so he could rig our air compressor up to do the same thing one of these days.

After rocket launching, we ate some lunch. Then we saw a show in the Planetarium, built paper air planes, and jumped in the bounce house. There was tons more to do, but it was time for us to head home. We will definitely be going back next year though.

On the way out I stopped to take a picture of the kids, because I thought them, and the mountains and the green grass would be a cool shot. It was...and apparently Aaron thought it would be fun to take a picture of me taking the picture. :)