School Field Trips – Grades 3 and Above

DYER OBSERVATORY IS CLOSED ANNUALLY DECEMBER-FEBRUARY.
OUR SCHOOL FIELD TRIP PROGRAM RESUMES EACH MARCH.

One of the Observatory’s missions is to interest students in the exciting career fields of science and engineering.  Locally, hundreds of children are thrilled as the see the Sun, Moon, planets and stars firsthand during visits to Dyer Observatory. The latest math and science report card shows that students in the United States are still well behind their counterparts in many Asian and European nations. Our goal is to turn these standings around by helping to inspire student interest in science and astronomy, and Vanderbilt Dyer Observatory is a great way for teachers to supplement their Science, Technology, Engineering, Math, and astronomy curriculum. The observatory is open to public, private, and home-schooled children.

Vanderbilt Dyer Observatory is a wonderful place to bring students for a weekday, daytime field trip from March through November. We can tailor a program which enhances the science/astronomy curriculum in a number of ways. Students can listen to an astronomy expert talk about various subjects followed by a question and answer session; they can tour the observatory’s dome and main telescope, participate in viewing the Sun with the solar telescope, weather-permitting, and more.

Please keep in mind the following items when planning your field trip:

• A field trip lasts approximately 1 to 1.5 hours. There is a $5 fee per student and $5 fee per teacher/parent/chaperone.
  
• Observatory field trips are for 3rd grade and above.
• The minimum group size is 15 and the maximum number of people is 40. Smaller groups may be accommodated, but there is a minimum fee of $75 per field trip.
• For the safety of all observatory guests, closed-toe footwear must be worn.
• There are approximately 20 steps leading up the to Seyfert Telescope.

Not able to bring your class to Dyer? No problem. We offer exciting outreach programming, assemblies, and family science encounters at schools throughout the Middle TN region.  Please follow the link if your school would like to request a visit by the Fisk-Vanderbilt Planetarium Roadshow https://my.vanderbilt.edu/planetarium/

Available Field Trip Program Activities

Observe the Sun through solar glasses as well as our hydrogen-alpha solar telescope to see the solar chromosphere, sunspots, prominences, and filaments.  Students will also be shown a live view of the Sun beforehand and the Sun’s observable features will be discussed.  Images and movies from space-based solar observatories showing solar and solar-related activity will also be presented with narration.

Students construct basic sundials on their own using a paper template.

Dyer Observatory has four telescope installations, three of which are mounted in domes on top of the observatory and are still actively used for observation.  Students will tour Dyer’s largest telescope, the Seyfert Telescope, and gain an understanding of its history, how it functions, how it compares to other observatory telescopes, and what it has been used to observe and study.

Dyer Observatory has a collection of nickel-iron and stony-iron meteorites as well as a number of tektites on display.  Students will observe the collection while our astronomer provides an explanation of how meteorites form, what the differences are in various types of meteorites, and how tektites form.  Students will also be given the opportunity to hold some of these 4.5 billion-year-old objects.

Dyer Observatory has several large-format infographics that discuss the Milky Way, galaxies in general, and the life cycles of stars.  On the adjacent wall is a 20′ panorama of the Milky Way that beautifully displays our home galaxy, shows the constellations visible in and around the band of the galaxy, and highlights 14 objects visible within the galactic landscape.  Our astronomer will provide explanations of what the images show, what we can learn from them, and how all of the images are ultimately related to one another.  Afterwards, students will move to the library to see our 1/5th-scale model of the Hubble Space Telescope, which is on extended loan from the Space Telescope Science Institute.  The astronomer will provide details about Hubble such as its actual size, orbital parameters, and capabilities.

We can use the Seyfert Telescope to view Venus if it is far enough from the Sun to be viewed safely.  This gives students an opportunity to see that some of other planets go through phases like the Moon.  We will also discuss what causes the phases and why this phenomenon was used as evidence that the Sun is actually the center of the solar system rather than the Earth.

We will present a PowerPoint slideshow about the relative sizes of the planets in our solar system and also compare them to the Sun.  We then compare the Sun to other stars and, if desired, to other celestial objects like nebulae and galaxies.

Students will walk-off a scale model of the solar system in which the Sun is represented by an 8″ ball.  As we walk to each planet, students are shown the scaled planet size while we discuss various aspects of the body, such as structure, number of moons, rings, etc.  With time constraints, we typically walk to Jupiter but also discuss how big and distant the remaining planets would be.

We present a PowerPoint presentation about the electromagnetic spectrum and how atoms and molecules produce their own colors of light.  We will discuss how these unique sets of colors can be used to determine aspects of celestial objects, such as composition, temperature, and velocity.  To give a more engaging approach to atomic spectra, we will use spectral discharge tubes to show examples of how various elements will produce their own “fingerprint” of colors.  This activity highly benefits from incorporating the “Solar Observation” activity into the program.

Using the planetarium software Stellarium, we will discuss how objects in the sky move with respect to one’s location.  We will also discuss how to find certain objects such as planets and constellations.  Students will also construct their own star wheels with provided paper and be instructed on how to use them to find celestial objects on their own.

Request to Schedule a Field Trip

If you would like to request a field trip visit to Vanderbilt Dyer Observatory, please fill out the information on the form below and select the activities you would like to have the Dyer Observatory astronomer do with your students.