The Grand Canyon

After visiting Flagstaff, Arizona I had the chance to go to The Grand Canyon. This giant canyon is 6,000 feet deep in some places and 15 miles wide. Yikes! Check out my video to see what I mean. It was amazing.

The Grand Canyon was carved out by the Colorado River over millions of years. Because it is so old, it contains very interesting pieces of history for our planet. Scientists from all over the world visit The Grand Canyon to study rocks, fossils, unique wildlife, and plant life.



I wanted to do a little hiking, so I decided to take a look at the map to see where I was. Every formation you see in the distance has a name. Some of the features are named after Native American tribes and some are named after famous travelers.



I managed to catch a lift with a friendly hiker by jumping into his backpack. He didn't seem to mind. I was happy to get to hike around the south rim of the canyon because the colors of the canyon change all day as the sun changes angles in the sky. So every step is a brand new view of The Grand Canyon.



More pictures from my hike.






The Grand Canyon is certainly a beautiful place. I found this really neat tree to play in before I continued my hike.

Hiking is only one of the things you can do at The Grand Canyon. You can also take mule rides to the bottom. You can take rafting trips and even camp out while you're there. As for me, I think I'm going to watch a beautiful sunset right here on this bench.

Flagstaff, Arizona

I recently visited my friend Dave who lives in Flagstaff, Arizona. Dave works for Lowell Observatory. The Lowell Observatory is actually a collection of many telescopes. One of these telescopes was used to discovered Pluto back in 1930. I'm still kind of sad that astronomers no longer consider Pluto a planet, but I guess it makes sense. There are seven moons in our solar system that are bigger than Pluto.



Astronomers at Lowell Observatory study a lot of different things. They study planets and moons in our solar system, planets outside of our solar system, comets, galaxies, star formation, and near Earth asteroids, just to name a few.



My Friend Dave works at a place where they combine the light from several small telescopes to get better images of stars. These images help the Navy know exactly where stars are located so they can guide satellites in outer space. I was curious about how it worked. So Dave explained that the first thing we had to do was open the rooftops that protected the telescopes during the day so they could collect starlight. Watch the video to see.



Now that the rooftops are open we can collect starlight with these mirrors.



The starlight from several of these mirrors is collected underground by a very complicated series of lenses and mirrors.



Dave explains that the starlight is then collected by instruments that can combine all of the light from all of the telescopes to form a single image of a star.



This is the control room, where Dave uses several computers to point the telescopes to different stars and take images of them.



We worked all night and I learned many new things about astronomy. If you ever have any questions about astronomy, please let me know.