Marine Science Institute (MSI) hosts aquarium spotlight days for parents and kids to come in to their facility and look at the marine life that they have. Its the time when kids can touch the fish, sponges, mussels, sea stars, crabs, leopard shark etc and feed some of them. The facility also has the skeleton of a 44 foot gray whale which some how made its way in to the Redwood creek in 1990.
The kids got to see the flat fish like the California halibut, diamond turbot, starry flounder which camouflage themselves really well with the sand and pebbles at the bottom of the ocean. There were tanks with surfperch, monkey eel, swell shark, sea anemone. The kids could hold the sea stars and got to see their tentacles and mouth. There was a huge tank with the leopard shark and kids fed it pieces of squid.
There was a lab set up where kids could look at the drop of water from the creek under microscopes and see the planktons like the diatoms, copepods etc.
We then took a stroll on the small beach next to the institute and observed dead barnacles on the poles, algae, shells and floats on the water.
After the marine science immersion I decided to take kids to the Fujitsu planetarium as it was the second last Saturday they would be open for this season. We watched the show "Cosmic journey" which was about the planets in our solar system. We then were shown the view of the sky that night and shown how to spot the Orion, the hunter (the belt, shoulders), Taurus the bull that he fights and Orion's 2 dogs. The narrator also showed the Leo constellation. He identified the stars Sirius, Beetle juice, Rigel, Polaris, Aldebaran and the star group Pleiades, the seven sisters. He pointed out that the stars which are red, orange color are cooler than the blue - white stars.
After the show we tried to identify some of the stars in the sky!
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