"Green" Fun- Christmas Lights

Believe it or not, Christmas is just around the corner. If you are like some of the ambitions people out there, you'll start putting up your Christmas lights the day after Thanksgiving! That gives you just over 2 months, but before you throw out any old or unwanted Christmas lights, think about turning them into a fun experiment instead!


Here is a picture from a previous post, see this one, that shows just one possibility with those lights. 

Fun for young and old, try rearranging colored ones into shapes or messages. For the more technologically advanced, perhaps a small logic board would bring even more possibilities! 

We want to try this out at the Schoolhouse in the coming months. If you've tried this before, let us know and send us a pictures. If you are interested in how we did this and have additional ideas, we are more than happy to talk! 

Just ask for Joe.

Flying 'Copters and a Throwing Star

 

 

The Schoolhouse- Fun Science

The Schoolhouse- Fun Science, a set on Flickr.

Our Flickr fotos for the Schoolhouse

August 10th- Schoolhouse Fun with Pegoes

Last week on Wednesday, Tommi and Joe experimented with Pegoes, blocks with 1 inch spacing drilled holes. On the left, Tommy is playing Lego golf. On the right, Tommy can be seen modeling the Pegoes Stilt prototypes in action with the Hoberman sphere as accessory. Click the images to enlarge.

 

~More photos (and even video clips!) coming up soon, so check back often.

August 3rd- Fun with Christmas Lights and the Hoberman Sphere

 The 1880's era schoolhouse building on Lenox Laser property has recently been renovated into a family-friendly space to promote the exploration of science. The walls are covered in pegboard, and they are covered with Lego and eBlox contraptions.







 Joe d'Entremont of Lenox Laser likes to take his grandchildren here to play and explore. Here, little Tommy and friend David experiment with inserting old Christmas lights into a pegboard stand.








Playing with the Hoberman sphere- a.k.a expanding sphere- fun for all ages!

Way to use your head!

Diffraction Project Award Winner

The son of Adam M. Spence, Attorney at Law,  won a local school and city award for his science fair project about diffraction.

The Kepler Mission and Lenox Laser

NASA Kepler Mission

This special purpose space mission that has been proposed to NASA Headquarter's Discovery Program as a practical method for detecting Extrasolar Terrestrial Planets, that is, rocky and Earth-size.

The Lenox Laser Corporation fabricated a custom Starfield Plate for the Kepler Mission.

"The star plate has a large number of holes of various sizes (used to perform time-variant relative photometry) and they are placed in many locations across the field-of-view to support the suite of tests described earlier. The plate is made of 50-micron thick stainless steel and opaque (transparency of less than one part in a million). The hole pattern was drilled with a laser beam by Lenox Laser, with some holes as small as 3 microns in diameter (for the mv=19 stars).

There are 84 holes for the 9< mv <14 target stars in the uncrowded region of the plate. These are used to isolate the effects of faint background stars, bright stars, smearing, etc. Some of these have very nearby stars as faint as mv=19 to demonstrate that stars five magnitudes fainter than the target star are not a problem even when spacecraft jitter is simulated.

There is a crowded portion of the plate with 1540 stars having the same star field density to mv=19 as the actual Cygnus region to be viewed by the Kepler Mission. This region was used to demonstrate the ability to perform the high-precision relative photometry even in crowded fields." Quote from the Kepler Mission Website