I’m in beautiful (if not, totally sunny) California this week for the American Astronomical Society’s Division of Planetary Sciences annual meeting.
Before the meeting officially starts on Monday, I helped organize the DPS Educators’ Workshop, a DPS tradition where planetary science-types work with local school teachers to explain the most recent science and help them develop lesson plans and activities for their students.
We spent several hours with teachers from all over SoCal and discussed lots of great activities, but one of the most popular and visually appealing is the Art and Astronomy activity.
For this activity, we invite the teachers to recreate space-based images of planetary surfaces using pastels. As usual with this activity, the teachers at first demured but ended up creating stunning and vibrant images of craters, geysers, and river deltas.
