Astronomy and Scouts

Any active Scout Troop will spend many nights under clear skies away from city lights - ideal conditions for observing the stars. We try to include an observing session on our weekend camp outs. Can you locate the north star? What three stars make up the summer triangle? Have you ever seen a meteor shower?
With a rudimentary understanding of astronomy and a few good sources of information any Scouter can lead an observing session.

For the next several days I'll do my best to point you to some excellent resources and ideas for building astronomy into your Troop's program. Here's some basics to get things rolling -

1.Studying the requirements for Astronomy Merit Badge is a great introduction to astronomy for anyone.

2.Scouts will retain just so much information - and will benefit from having it repeated several times. Our observing session begins with a brief overview of the sky- a few stars and major constellations - perhaps half a dozen things total for a maximum of three or four minutes. Then the Scouts are given the opportunity to repeat the the tour themselves. One volunteers to begin and repeats the information until he makes a mistake, the Scout who spots the mistake then gets to take over until he completes the tour or makes a mistake himself.

3. An invaluable tool is a green laser pointer. As you may imagine once they see this tool Scouts are very interested in trying it out themselves. They can do so (under close supervision) in repeating the tour as outlined above. Using the pointer is a huge incentive for Scouts to pay close attention. Besides all this the pointer is a great aid in assuring that everyone is actually looking at the same stars or constellations.

Associated resources at Scoutmaster:
Astronomy and Scouts - Tools
Astronomy and Scouts - Web Resources
Rods, Cones and Wint-O-Green Lifesavers