Take the Sun...

Marcus' handwriting has taken a great leap forward, and what he has to say is terrific too.

Latest from the boys

Above (by Marcus) My name is 2009! My name is 2008 and I'm sobbing.


Above (by Michael) two very complicated solar systems. The second one has instructions for making a model of the expanding universe, by painting white dots on a black balloon then blowing it up. Below (by Michael) a complicated human body.

Solar System Simulator

In the early days of Michael's obsession with planets, I was discussing orreries with my friend Matt K - also quite a star-struck young man. It would be lovely to have a beautifully precision engineered $30,000 orrery, with all the planets spinning on their axes as they swoop around a sun about the size of a beachball. I can just see it in one corner of our living room - the orrery corner. No touching now! Only dad is allowed to give it a light dusting, once a (Mercurial) year.

Anyway. Back in the real world, Matt suggested that there are some great computer simulations available online. Huh, I thought. You get what you pay for - there'll be freeware available where the planets are chunky dodecahedrons that actually bump into each other occasionally due to a glitch in the Lingo coding, or the floating point something-or-other.

I was dead wrong. This is freeware, it is fantastic, and I urge you to download and start playing with it immediately!!! (12.4MB download.) Here are some short screen-capture animations and a couple of stills. It is deeply interactive - you can set it going at any speed you wish (second=second, second=day, second = month and graduations thereof) and then alter the point of view at will.




So thank you to Matt K, and thank you to SSSim. I think they are based in Japan, but their site is extremely reticent to name names or take credit for this amazing achievement.

State of the nation

Michael is still obsessed with the solar system. He is maniacally trying to classify the size of everything. He doesn't ask questions as much as make statements and wait to see if they are accepted.

Dad - Jupiter is this soccer ball, and Earth is this lump of mud! Dad - the Sun is this lampshade, and Venus is this marble! Dad - the Sun is the biggest star of all. The Moon is a galaxy! Dad - the Moon is not a galaxy, it is a star. Dad - the Earth is like the Sun's moon! All the planets are like the Sun's moons! etc.

This segues neatly into...

Dad - Asia is the biggest country! Dad - Asia is a continent! What is Asia's flag? What is Antarctica's flag? I thought Australia was a country. How can it be a continent if it has a flag? etc.

Also recently - "Dad - I know what came after the cavemen. The Olden Days". And "Dad, God made us, but he didn't make our language!" This was just before he was dropped off with Elf's sister. I left her to deal with the follow-up questions after I made a passing reference to the Tower of Babel.

Marcus is also pushing me into new areas of knowledge. We had been talking of the moons of Saturn, Neptune etc, and the boys demanded I give them hard numbers. We looked a few things up on Wikipedia, and we came to the dwarf planet Haumea, which is apparenty coated with a crust of ice. Marcus's eyes lit up and he said "If we could go there with some kind of heating device we could live there!

We've gone solar

I came up with a few half-baked ideas to fill a few hours of the school holidays. Michael had asked me if we could make an orrery - a mechanical model of the solar system. He saw one in the background in a storybook and it really stuck in his head. I tried to think of an achievable way of making one, but I couldn't really. I know that if I made a non-functional contraption out of toothpicks and foam balls, we would be stuck with it forever, so matter how unsightly and hopeless it might look to grown-ups.

So I aimed low, and instead I drew approximate sized circles for the kids to colour in. I had Karri and Miah as well as the boys that day, so we shared the planets around. I cut the sun out of an old sample calendar made of yellow card, and everyone joined in drawing flames on it. When they had finished the planets I added some shading to one side, and used my recently redisovered blu-tak technique to make a highlight on the sun side, then I just stuck it all to the wall with the versatile grey-blue product.

Marcus was very specific about the moons. He had read somewhere that Mars had 2, Saturn 16, Jupiter 10 etc etc. I think he remembered them all perfectly, but thanks to the Hubble telescope a lot of this long-accepted stuff is out of date now. Jupiter now has four big moons, 12 substantial moons and at least 47 moonlets. Then there is all that ridiculous dwarf-planet business, whereby Pluto has been de-planetised. There are officially now 8 planets, and four dwarf planets. Some of the dwarf planets have moons. Also Marcus is very keen to add the rings which have now been observed around Jupiter, Neptune and Uranus. I am having trouble accepting non-Saturnian rings - I like Saturn to be special! I don't want to talk about TNOs (trans-Neptunian objects).

The next door boys were over here this afternoon so I set the four boys to work colouring moons. Eventually we will get the moons into orbit and probably the rest of the rings and I guess the dwarf planets and then we might look at some labels. So let's call this picture a progress report.

The Sun shines on the Planet Party

Well, the party season is over for another year. We had Marcus's Planet Party here on Sunday. It took a lot of preparation and planning, but it was all worth it, as it went off very well.

Marcus had a great time, as did all the other kids. Even the parents seemed to find it reasonably pain-free, which is not something you can always say about kids' parties. There were no tantrums, wrestling was kept within acceptable limits, and every child (over two) won a prize. Lana, one of my favourite other-people's-kids, asked me during the grape-and-spoon race "Excuse me, but will we all get a prize for doing our best?"

Marcus garnered a lot of great presents, and people even embraced the theme with the gifts - quite a few flying-type space-rockety things. Anna dressed her girls up in special space-costumes she made during the week. My Mum made planet-theme hats for herself and Dad from papier maché. Mum's just didn't come out right, so she left it home and wore a special "Milky Way" scarf instead, that came in very handy later as a blindfold for games. Dad proudly wore his silver wingéd helmet (as made famous by the Roman god Mercury).

The weather held up. We had planned a lot of indoor things as we were expecting rain, but the kids kept gravitating (side-splitting space pun) out to the back yard. We also had things for them to do out there, so that was fine. Eventually we had to herd them back in, for cake and singing and then again later for my blindfolded pin-the-sticky-star-on-the-globe game.

The aim of this game was to get the sticker as close as possible to Tasmania. Marcus cheated quite transparently and got his sticker right smack bang on the Central Highlands. His next legitimate guess wasn't bad, it was about 1000km south of Albany, WA. Blake was the winner by a few hundred km, with his sticker in the McDonnell Ranges. Ebony landed in Argentina and Lily landed in Botswana.

The guests drifted off around twelve, and we collapsed in a heap. It was only a brief lull, before leaving the kids with Mum and Dad for a couple of hours and going off to look at light fittings.