Our Homeschool Diary: Directions, Meteor Shower, and The Solar Eclipse

Directions

One of the lessons we had recently was about directions -- North, East, South, and West. Without a compass, the kids learned to point to general directions just by following the sun.

Where does the sun rise? That's the East.

Where does the sun set? That's the West.

Point to the East with your right hand, and the west with your left hand, then you would be facing north and behind you is south.

Easy, yeah?

The kids did not stop there and downloaded a compass app on my phone. You know, just to check if it is really correct! (Fortunately, the compass showed the same! LOL)

We also made our own compass.

For this activity, we needed the following:

1. a magnet
2. a needle
3. a bowl of water
4. a piece of paper cut into a small circle, folded in the middle, and marked N (for north) and S (for south) on either end of the fold.

We first magnetized the needle by rubbing it to the magnet. Note: We had a small magnet so we had to do this longer.

Carefully place the needle on the water. We can see that the magnetized needle turn to point to north and south.

To validate, we used the compass app that we downloaded and see if the needle is pointing to the same direction.

Orionids Meteor Shower (October 20, 2022)

This was an unexpected trip we took to the desert with our friends for a barbeque night. It coincided with the peak of the Orionid Meteor Shower on late night of October 20th until the early hours of October 21st. The meteors are fragments of dust left behind by Halley's Comet as it orbits the sun.

The camping park is located 65 kilometers from the city.

The kids had fun making smores while we waited for the peak of the meteor shower at around 11:00pm to 1:00am.

In between, we tried to identify some constellations and planets in the sky using the Sky View app. We've been using this app for the past two years, the first time was to view the Jupiter and Saturn conjuction in late December 2020.

It was astonishing to observe the heavenly bodies move across the sky as time passed by. Jupiter, being one of the brightest in the sky that night, was the one that Little Man mainly focused on. At one point, it was directly above our heads!

Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star! We Had Fun With AR (Augmented Reality StarView App)

Using the app, we were able to identify the direction of the Orion Constellation, where we should be able to see a concentration of the meteor shower. They said about 10 - 20 meteors shoot through the sky during the peak -- I only personally witnessed two. LOL.

Partial Solar Eclipse (October 25, 2022)

We did not run out of beautiful spectacle from the sky, both night or day. Just a few days after the meteor shower viewing, we excitedly waited for the partial solar eclipse that was visible in the UAE last week, October 25th.

The partial solar eclipse began at about 2:40pm and peaked at 3:51pm.

The kids used some exposed xray films to be able to look at the sun.

Our 3 y/o neighbor, "looking" at the eclipse.

The partial solar eclipse that was visible in the UAE last October 25 peaked at 48.3% part of the sun covered by the moon.

The kids looked at the sun (using the film) several times within this period and observed the "bite" getting bigger each time.