Starry Starry Night: Year 5 Astronomy Evening

September 16, 2021

Year 5 students looked to the stars and the world beyond our own planet this week, in an exciting visit from Rick Tonello, a very talented astronomer from the Gravity Discovery Centre.

As an introduction to their Space unit starting in Term 4, the students and their parents were shown some incredible images of the moon and planets. We learnt how some craters on the moon are cooled molten rock caused by collisions billions of years ago and how one crater is over 2000 kilometres in diameter.

After a very intriguing talk, we headed out to the Figure 8, where there were four stations for everyone to rotate through. Rick had his telescopes set up for us to look at Saturn, Jupiter, and the moon. We could even use one telescope to take a photo of the moon!

Miss Price used the latest apps to allow students to explore the world of constellations. We explored not only our star signs, but other weird and wonderful constellations discovered hundreds of years ago. If you’d like to check them out, the apps were Star Chart and SkyView Lite.

Mrs Coster had us flat on our backs doing some stargazing. We saw a lot of stars, moving satellites and even a shooting star!

Mrs Poole taught us the phases of the moon with an interactive activity matching up the different phases we see throughout the month.

Our Year 7 boarders even got to come out and look through the telescopes before they were dismantled.

This was such an incredible experience for Year 5 students, who are now very keen to continue their passion for space during Science next term. It would not be surprising to see many future astronomers come out of this cohort in years to come.

Here’s what some of the girls thought:

This excursion was so much fun. I liked the telescopes looking up to Saturn. I have never seen the rings before. Wow! Mia Rodriguez

The constellation app was really cool. You can see the constellations through the app even if they aren’t there. There are a lot of constellations in our sky! Lucy Lomma

I liked the apps we used to look at the sky. You could see all the planets and what they were called. We also saw all the star sign constellations. I didn’t know that I would be able to see Saturn! Isabella Whitcher

We laid down on mats and looked at stars while some girls read out fun facts about space. When the sky is really clear, you can see up to 90 million kilometres up into the sky. That blew me away because I didn’t know you could see that far! Sienna Stone

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Author: Santa Maria College
Santa Maria College is a vibrant girls school with a growing local presence and reputation. Our Mission is to educate young Mercy women who act with courage and compassion to enrich our world. Santa Maria College is located in Attadale in Western Australia, 16 km from the Perth CBD. We offer a Catholic education for girls in Years 5 – 12 and have 1300 students, including 152 boarders.