Wild Planet Day at the Great Valley Museum
by Brandilyn Brown
In case you haven’t heard about it before, The Great Valley Museum’s annual Wild Planet Day is a fun event you don’t want your kids or grandkids to miss. While standard classroom settings struggle to make science fun, it’s an easy task to do for the awesome staff of volunteers at the four-floor Science Community Center at the West Campus Modesto Junior College. Not only can students with bright minds witness robot races, they can make a bat box and learn about bats from The Bat Lady, explore chemistry techniques with Enoch High School’s CSI program, and even take a trip into space! If you’ve found a “neat rock” on a recent adventure, you should bring your unidentified chunk of Earth to the Geology Club’s table to identify for you. Experienced staff members will guide you through the museum, and will bring out reptiles for your viewing delight.
The planetarium, with its best-in-the-nation Carl Zeiss projector, will take you on incredible and life like tours of our universe using LED and digital technology. After “boarding the starship” and getting comfortable in your seat, you can see the night sky above the Central Valley even in daytime. You can roam around to see any of our other eight planets, or go outside the Milky Way Galaxy and see the millions of other galaxies in our universe. Using the Zeiss, those of us who are not astronomers can now see the Great Red Spot on Jupiter, the shadow of Saturn’s rings on its surface, and the famous non-spherical moon of Mars, Phobos, which looks more like a potato than our very-round moon. There will be several shows to choose from, and each show is only additional $5.
Last year we learned a lot about bats, this year special guest Park Ranger Shawn Estes will talk to us about bears. Bring the whole family and have a “beary” good time!
$5 per person OR $20 for a family of 6.
Parking is free on Saturdays.
Saturday Oct 14th, 10am-3pm.
Great Valley Museum
Science Community Center
MJC West Campus
2201 Blue Gum Avenue
Modesto, CA 95358
