Goodbye, Reno Summer ’09
Reno Summer '09
Summer 2009 has come to an end, which I truly realized when I hit my 200 photo max while posting Balloon Race photos to my Facebook album, Summer Lovin’. I’m not sure what a great job I did of capturing and blogging my summertime adventures, but as always my camera was on hand to capture my memories forever. Take a peak at Summer Lovin’ for pictorial coverage of my Reno-Tahoe summer and the Summer Road Trip album for photos taken on our trip to the California Redwoods and Oregon.
I’m hitting two years of life in Reno at the end of October…I’ve loved almost every minute of my time here and can’t wait for whatever happens next.
The First Reno Review. UNR Planetarium.
Crystal and Matt make learning FUN.
Experience date: 3/28/09
stars ~ 3.5
Because 67 mph winds canceled plans to get a full day in skiing Alpine Meadows, my boyfriend Matt and I were left wide awake at 9am on a Sunday morning (which is very, very early on a weekend for the likes of us) with absolutely no plans and nothing to do in our beloved Reno.
So, after breakfast downtown at Peg’s Glorified Ham & Eggs, trips to Junkee, Plato’s Closet, Marshall’s and that pet store on Wells Avenue, it was barely afternoon. What were we to do? (Besides agree that Matt is a fantastic boyfriend, actually accompanying me to all of these places with a smile on his face.)
Enter the Fleischmann Planetarium & Science Center on the campus of the University of Nevada. Most 20-something couples don’t exactly frequent this Reno attraction on the weekends, but my scientist boyfriend and I managed to convince our friends Zach and Janet to join us for the 2pm showing of ‘Black Holes’ which included a 10-minute star show. If we were going to be awake from 7:30am on a Sunday in shitty weather, we were going to DO SOMETHING. Even something educational. (I was more than “secretly” excited though, I’m not gonna lie. I tend to be quite easily amused.)
Walking (fast) up to the planetarium the wind whipped us around, but we pressed on and entered the building. After negotiating the price (I pulled out my long expired student ID and got away with a $2 discount…hehehe) we forked over 10 bucks as a couple and headed down the stairs to the large, domed room.
We got stuck sitting on the right side, because the early birds had already arrived and snagged the middle. We leaned back in our chairs (which, somewhat disappointingly after Matt’s raving of the fabulous recline at the various planetariums he’d previously been to, didn’t quite measure up to what I was hoping for) and got ready to learn. At least I did, seeing as I knew about the big and little dipper and pretty much nothing else on the subject of stargazing and black holes.
It began, and we watched the intro video on stars. It wasn’t too shabby, and gave a pretty good overview of stargazing in the Spring, and what we should watch for. Note: I have forgotten almost everything that was overviewed. I do remember thinking “I need to stargaze tonight!” Which didn’t happen. Next up was the tutorial on black holes. Black holes, from what I now understand, are dead stars. When stars die, it means they burned up all the gases that had made them a star in the first place. The burning keeps them alive for a long time, creating the exact right amount of energy give off and therefore gravitational pull. When they burn through all their elements and get to an element such as iron, which actually uses energy in the process versus giving off energy—its pretty much the end of that star.
A black hole I’ve learned sucks up everything close enough to it and compresses it into very very very tight matter, just getting more and more powerful. But, don’t worry people—they said that our star, the sun, has about 5 million more years of burning brightly before we need to worry about Earth being sucked into nothingness. That is, if they even do exist…they are, after all, invisible.
After the show, Matt decided he absolutely needed a souvenir so we browsed for a while where he decided on growing his own crystals (the employee at the counter said don’t bother, we’d be disappointed), then a wooden puzzle (he carried it around for a while), and finally we went home with nothing but a picture in front of a huge model Earth…and a couple of smiles.
So there you have it. The University of Nevada Planetarium in fabulous Reno, Nevada. I’m giving it 3.5 STARS. Next time though, I’ll find some eager kiddies to escort. I think they’d appreciate it just a little bit more than we did.
