Spectrum Scientifics now carries Dunecraft’s new Hydro-Dome, an educational hydroponics system that can fit on a windowsill.

This kit comes with the usual Growing Dome along with 4 pots with mineral wool. Some lettuce seeds and nutrient packs are included, along with a specialized hydro-pump for adding the nutrient-rich water. The wool suspends the plant in the air (or water). the extra oxygen stimulates faster root growth and lets the plant better absorb nutrients. The result is plants that grow 50% faster than plants in soil! In a lab setting, plants also require much less space. A hydroponic garden can have as much yield as a garden 5 times its size!

Growing lettuce isn’t the only thing you learn with the hydrodome. You’ll also learn to make root cuttings and even ‘clone’ a plant via snippings. All of which is possible thanks the hydroponic systems!

The concept of BrainString is simple: You have a clear acrylic ummmm…well it’s not a cube, so we’ll call it a polyhedron even though that probably isn’t accurate either. In any case there are various colored stretchy strings that go through the polyhedron to the opposite side. Each of the strings can have its end moved (they have colored nubs on the end) so that it comes out at a different side of the polyhedron then the one opposite where it goes in!

To solve the puzzle you must get all the colored strings so that they are all color coded together. That is, a side of the polyhedron has strings of only one color and the side opposite that has all the same color. You move the cords by pulling up on the ends and moving it along the slots to its new location.

Sound simple? Well, here’s the trick: To properly solve the puzzle the cords inside the polyhedron can’t be twisted or entangled in any way. For other challenges you can try to solve it by getting three different color strings on each side of the polyhedron, or two of one color and a second color. In any case you can’t have any entangled strings inside.

Much like the classic Rubik’s Cube you receive the puzzle solved, and mess it up yourself by whatever means you like and then solve it from there. BrainString can be a great challenge of not only problem-solving, but also of spacial awareness and 3D problem solving.

BrainString is for ages 6+.

The Knight planisphere is a vast improvement over previous planispheres that were either made of laminated cardboard, or were too large, or too small to be of use. The Knight planisphere is made of plastic, and has is double sided: one side for viewing when facing North and one while facing South. This gives more detailed views and makes it easier to read the planisphere. Also included is a built-in compass to help with orienting yourself.

In addition, we have also added the Deluxe Knight Planisphere which includes the planisphere as well as a useful carabiner red flashlight. This flashlight uses red light to preserve night vision while still giving your a light to examine your planisphere. In addition, the carabiner has a clock/timer. Also included in the set is a DVD filled with awesome images of outer space from the NASA and Hubble archives. Dozens and dozens of exquisite photographs in a way never seen before.

First, a demo of the Photoelectric effect (props to Terry Price for pointing this one out):

and our own Homopolar Motor!

Enjoy!

This is the drummer kit, perhaps one of the most impressive, but hardly the only model. Spectrum also carries the Dragon, the T-Rex (or TimberSaur) and Ocean Motion.

You do the model assembly yourself, with the help of excellent instructions and some finely made pre-cut wood pieces:

Assembly isn’t easy, but it isn’t overly-hard either (anyone over the age of 10 should be able to do it) but it is rewarding. When you are done, the model will be ready to ‘play’.

Want to see what it does when you are done? Have a look at this video:

The TimberKits are examples of wooden automata. Automata were machines that date back as far as ancient Greece. Machines were used to act as toys, or perform simple functions. They work on simple mechanical principles and functions: gears, levers, cranks, shafts, pulley, etc. Although replaced these days by more modern machinery they had a true high-water point in the 18th and 19th century when they could perform wonders with gearing. A surviving example of this is the Henri Maillardet automaton at the Franklin Institute:

With automata doing wonders like this it is not too surprising that more than a few unscrupulous folks took advantage of the wonders and made fakes, perhaps the most famous of which was the infamous chess-playing Turk.

TimberSmith kits are but a simplistic version of those mechanical wonders, but they are buildable by us, and that makes them wonders on their own.

Sun Photography? Cyanotypes? Sure we are familiar with them. After all we have carried Solar Photography kits pretty much ever since we opened! heck we have even done blog posts about them and they have been a consistent best-seller since we opened!

So why on Earth would we get excited about another Solar Photography kit…this time called Sunography?

The answer is simple: Quality. The Sunography kits come in two versions: one of paper, and the other using cloth. Both sell for $14.95 and have 6 sheets each.

The Paper kit is made with high-quality 5″x 7″ sheets of 100% cotton white archival water-color paper and the fabric version uses 6″ x 6″ 100% cotton fabric squares! While you get only six sheets, each sheet (or fabric square) is double-sided so that you can do prints on each side! Even better, the sheets each have a different color! you get on of each of the following colors: violet, lime, turquoise, orange, rose, and white). The prints develop in the standard Prussian Blue, but the paper itself remains the original color.

The paper or fabric can also be easily toned yellow or sepia buy rinsing it in a detergent or black tea.

The resolution and high-quality nature of Sunography kits is best for those who want to make solar photographs of images using old film negatives, X-rays, or other transparencies. If people ask ‘which do I use’, we answer: “If just experimenting with kids or practicing solar phography, use the Sunprint Kits.

If you are making a work of art, use the Sunography Kits!

You can learn more about SDO and its mission at the NASA webpage or get more current updates by being Little SDO’s friend on Facebook.

The question of how to view snowflakes basically depends on how much you want to endure the cold and the snow. If you can put up with it, you can view real snowflakes, otherwise you are going to be viewing impressions of snowflakes in a clear material and it can take a lot longer.

Viewing snowflakes in the snow is fairly simple but does involve some preparation. You need a microscope that you can use outdoors (in the snow) and some flat glass slides. Ahead of the snowstorm, get some of the slides in the freezer or leave out into cold weather under some shelter. The idea here is to get the glass very cold so the flakes do not melt, while at the same time keeping any moisture off the slides that might fog it up.

If you can, try to build some kind of open ended shelter for your microscope. Something with a roof to keep the snow off the eyepieces. You can use any microscope for this but cordless models with LEDs avoid complex wiring and heat from lamps that might melt your snowflakes. Be sure the microscope can handle the harsh weather as well.

The process? Simply catch some snowflakes on the cold slides and then view them under your microscope. Try not to breath on your microscope while viewing as this can fog up the lenses. Try to catch the smaller flakes and the bigger ones are usually multiple flakes stuck together. Dry snow works much better than ‘wet’ snow.

Keep in mind even with all the best preparation in the world your snowflakes might still melt before you get a chance to view them, let alone photograph them.

The Superglue Technique

OK, not so big on standing out in the cold weather? Well there is another method that takes more time, but the only other materials you need are some superglue (liquid, preferably the kind in drop bottles) and some slide coverslips, as well as your home’s freezer. These should all be cold and left outside in the cold weather or in the freezer before hand.

Same trick as before: take the cold slides and catch some snowflakes. But then put a drop of superglue on top of the snowflake, then put a cover slip on top of the glue and press gently. Keep in mind putting the glue and coverslip on can be very tricky when wearing gloves (or with bare hands in the cold!) and cold superglue doesn’t just come right out of the bottle easily. Now get that stuff inside and into the freezer. Don’t dawdle once you go indoors or your snowflake will melt before the superglue hardens!

Leave the snowflake slides in the freezer for a few weeks while the superglue hardens. Once it does, you can take the slide out and put them right on your microscope!

We’ve already discussed our addition of the regular StarBlast 6 which actually caught us a bit off guard with its sales. And now Orion has developed a computer guided version using its popular Intelliscope system!

The difference is that you get the Intelliscope computer guidance system, with a database of 14,000 celestial objects that will help you find those especially elusive objects!

We’ve often railed against low-cost computer controlled telescopes, and the reason we do is because of that second word: controlled. Many a cheap telescope with a simplistic computer system has been made on the cheap and the more often than not take away from the viewer’s experience. The controls don’t allow you the freedom of moving the telescope yourself and to aim the telescope you must use the computer systems. Not so with the Intelliscope. Here you are in charge of the telescope, with the computerized object finder assisting you in finding objects, but not trying to take control away from you nor finding everything for you. There are no motors to wear out, no gears to strip, no clutches to burn out. The only battery is in the controller so you won’t find yourself in the middle of a viewing session with motor batteries dying on you. The Intelliscope system keeps things simple and fun for the user, and if you don’t want to use it, don’t use it, save it for finding the more tricky objects instead!

The StarBlast 6i still comes with the same great features as its non-computerized cousin: 2 Plossl eyepieces, EZ Finder Reflex Finder, eyepiece rack, and more.

So come on and get some compact and portable computer guided computer joy today!

Maybe it is because Pluto was the only ‘planet’ to be discovered by an American, maybe it is a love of the Disney dog with the same name, maybe it is because the mnemonic devices for remembering the planets they learned as a child are now defunct (Mother Very Thought Made a Jelly Sandwich Under No Protest, i.e.), most likely it is just a disruption of what many considered to be an orderly solar system without real reason. After all, if some scientists can just waltz in and say Pluto isn’t a planet they can do it to any of our favorite planets! It seemed unprecedented and without cause.

But the fact of the matter is: there were very good reasons for the re-classification, and things like this have actually happened before.

So where do we start in discussing Pluto? How about where it lives: The Kuiper Belt.

The Kuiper Belt was theorized back in the 1930 with the discovery of Pluto. It seemed to many an Astronomer that it didn’t make sense that Pluto was the only planet beyond Neptune. Add to that its smaller size and composition seemed to indicate that Pluto might be just one of many. For a long time, the Kuiper belt was mostly a theory, but with many elements that made sense (especially with regards to other Solar System objects such as comets), the theory changed a lot over the decades, and nothing could really be proven as technology was not up to finding more objects past Pluto. Even the best astrophotograph of Pluto by the Hubble Space Telescope was mostly a pixelated mess.

There’s a new kid in town

The problems started with the discovery of a new object past Pluto: Eris (at first nicknamed ‘Xena’ after the TV show character). Eris was larger than Pluto, and it became apparent that there might easily be more planets, so it didn’t seem correct to call Eris the 10th Planet just yet. There was much hemming and hawing, but mostly the issue was put on the backburner. The question was deliberately avoided and you would be hard pressed to find any posters printed that show Eris in place as the 10th planet. But soon things came to a head.

Enter the World’s Sexiest AstroPhysicist

The issue came to a head when Neil Degrasse Tyson, Director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York had his Planetarium make a exhibit on the planets of our solar system.

The Planetarium’s display idea was simple: put planets in the categories they fit in rather than their orbit order. It was easy enough: rocky planets like Mercury, Venus, Mars, Earth, and Gassy planets like Neptune, Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus.

Trouble was, Pluto didn’t fit into either of those categories. It certainly wasn’t a gas giant, and it wasn’t rocky like the inner planets. In fact, its composition was more in common with comets than planets! In fact, if Pluto decided to wander closer into out solar system it would actually grow a tail like comets do from the solar winds. It was obvious this wasn’t going to fit anywhere. So Pluto had no display at the Hayden. Soon the media got wind of Pluto’s absence and things started to cascade. In the meantime, a few more objects had been discovered in the Kuiper belt, so astronomers couldn’t ignore the issue anymore.

Just What is it?

The problem, at the core, is that there had never been a real definition of what a planet is. Planet simply means ‘wanderer’ in greek and they were called that because the visible planets meandered independently of the stars. But that was hardly an ironclad definition. In fact this lack of definition had caused trouble before: Ceres.

Ceres was discovered in 1801, and was almost immediately declared to be a new planet. Textbooks and other materials of that era actually would list Ceres as being a planet between Mars and Jupiter. For over 50 years it stayed that way. But soon more and more objects were being found in what is now known as the Asteroid Belt. These objects were soon reclassified as asteroids and Ceres was no longer considered to be a planet, but and asteroid. Like Pluto, it received a demotion.

Define Your Terms

So the international astronomy community started to work on new definitions for what a planet actually is. At first they stumbled, badly. In an effort to not lose Pluto as a planet it was first decided that a planet was pretty much anything in the solar system that was large enough to have a spherical shape and wasn’t a satellite of another planet. This, of course, was a failure of a definition as not only did it mean that all the new Kuiper belt objects were now planets, but Ceres was also a planet again! This obviously was not going to work.

So a new definition was worked on, this time it was decided to not only define a planet, but also develop a new definition for what Pluto et. al. were as well. It was decided that a planet was:

a) Large enough to be spherical from its own mass

b) Has sufficiently clear its orbital path of other large objects.

And that was that. Pluto had the first part, but didn’t even come close on the second. And so Pluto was demoted for not cleaning its room.

For objects that were round but didn’t meet the other qualification, a new term was invented “Dwarf Planet“. The definition of a dwarf planet was that it simple be massive enough to be spherical (larger objects become spherical because of the mass of the gravitational pull on themselves overcomes other factors). So Pluto, Eris, Ixion, Orcus, and even Ceres. Yes, little Ceres got promoted by this new definition. The only dwarf planet not in the Kuiper Belt.

And so is the story of how Pluto became a planet. This actually was the short version, you can imagine how long the full tale was.

Oh, and for a bit of trivia, Mike Brown, the guy who discovered Eris, which might have been the tenth planet but instead triggered the de-planeting of Pluto? Well, he now twitters under the name plutokiller.