This evening, Cub Scouts from Pack 152 came to the Observatory to learn about stars, planets, and other objects in space. Our original plan was to look at Saturn through our telescopes, but the sky did not cooperate, unfortunately.
So, we turned to a big question: how do astronomers know the chemical makeup of stars? We can't visit them, scoop out some gas, and bring it back to our labs on Earth, of course. The scouts put on some diffraction glasses and examined the spectra of three mystery elements, comparing the pattern of colors to those in a list of known elements.
Thanks very much to Stacey Davis for helping to run the exercise and answer many questions about black holes, planets, and galaxies.