Apollo11 – Lab Rascals

Tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing.

On July 20th, 1969 at 2117 UK time, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon, making them the first humans to ever land on another world. The world watched as Armstrong took his first step onto the moon and Aldrin followed, while Michael Collins flew the command and service modules in orbit around the moon.

This momentous event was the culmination of over a decade of hard work by over 400,000 people. 530 million people watched around the world.

But this was 50 years ago! Not everyone can remember the moon landings themselves and a lot of the children we work with, don’t even know that they happened. So our Astronomy manager created a planetarium show to commemorate the anniversary of the moon landings. We’ve had a busy week taking the show into schools, including Stepney Primary, where the whole school watched the show. This show was designed for KS2 and older children but we managed to adapt it so the children in the nursery and reception could enjoy it too. It was hugely successful! Over 180 children experiencing the moon landing in 1 day!

Tomorrow, on the day of the anniversary, we will be helping Hull Libraries to launch their reading scheme. This year the scheme has a space theme and we will be performing our show all day! We’re honoured to be able to perform these sold-out shows to a public audience on such an important day! See you there?

Have a great weekend! Keep looking up!

Katie, Carol, Lauren and Anita

The Lab Rascals Team xx

We’ve been out and about with the planetarium again this week! We’ve had a student working on a planetarium project for the last few months. She designed a show about Earth, which she then presented at Healing Primary on Tuesday. The children in KS1 loved the show. They learnt about the weather, seasons and took a trip around the world.

We also had a practice run of our brand new planetarium show, One Giant Leap, with Healing Primary year 5 and 6. We think it’s really important to have a day of practice before a new planetarium show is launched for a number of reasons. Working on a show on a pc screen does not replicate what it will look like in the planetarium dome. So a test of the visuals is essential. Also, as with any interactive performance you really can’t judge how interactive it will be until you actually perform it, which then results in timing changes and parts being removed etc. This was also the first time we’d used sound for a planetarium show and we had a few technical issues with the speaker, which we could then fix during the practice shows.

We performed the show 4 times throughout the day and by the end of the day were really happy with the show. We aim to make the children think and I think we succeeded as they had some amazing questions afterwards. And we got some great feedback from the children.