(upbeat music) - Hey, friends.

I'm Dever Norman.

I'm one of the professors here at Henderson State University.

And we're here at the Reynolds Science Center where we study all kinds of things like biology and engineering.

And we also study the stars and the rockets, how to get there.

Behind me you can see the silver dome here, that's our planetarium and that's one of the places we like to look at the stars.

So do you wanna come see?

Come on.

(upbeat music) So here we are inside the planetarium that we talked about before and there's this giant dome ceiling where we can see the stars.

In order to see them, we have this projector here that we can use to project the stars onto the dome.

Here with us is my friend, Shannon Clardy.

She's a scientist who studies stars.

So what are we looking at right now, Shannon?

- So right now the dome is set so that we are seeing the sky outside in this location exactly as it is at this moment.

So if we went outside and looked up, it would look just like it does in here.

We use it for our astronomy classes, but we also have public planetarium shows.

Would you like to take a look?

- Yes.

Yes.

- [Shannon] Right now it's day time and our planetarium looks just like it does outside.

But imagine we could put a great big cloud over the sun.

We see that there are millions of stars in the sky right now, during the day.

We just don't see them because the sun is so bright that the stars can't compete with the sun's light.

(playful upbeat music) Not only can we see the outlines of the constellations, we have a really great way of imagining what they might look like with the artwork.

We can also view the planets.

We see right now, Mercury, Venus and Mars are all in the daytime sky.

So let's go back to daytime for a minute and take the cloud off the sky.

We can fast forward in time in the planetarium.

So we can see what our sky will look like just after the sun goes down tonight.

And then you can see what you might want to look for if you go outside and look up at the stars.

So here comes sunset.

Right at sunset, you can start to see Venus on the horizon.

You may not be able to see Mars very well but you can definitely see Venus.

It's gonna look like a little disc of light, like a really bright star.

One really cool thing that we can do in the planetarium is we can pick things like Mars and Venus, and we can zoom in on them.

This is what Mars would look like through a telescope.

You can even see the polar ice cap on the end of Mars.

You'd have to have a really powerful telescope to be able to see the moons of Mars.

You can't see them with your naked eye.

Let's fast forward a little bit.

We see this cloudy area rising in the east, but that's not a cloud in our atmosphere.

That's a cloud out in space.

That's the Milky Way.

That's actually the disc of our galaxy.

It looks cloudy because it's full of gas and dust.

And that gas and dust blocks light or it glows from the light that's coming from the stars behind it.

We look at the Milky Way and nearby we see the moon.

And we can also see that Saturn is rising in our night sky.

Let's take a quick look at Saturn and see what it might look like if we were to see it through a telescope.

As we zoom in on Saturn, you can actually see the rings of Saturn.

We can zoom in a little bit more.

You can see the gaps in between the rings.

The rings of Saturn are only tens of meters thick but they're hundreds of meters across.

And they're made up of particles of ice and rocks.

This is what Saturn would look like if you had a really good telescope.

In fact, we have a telescope set up to show you.

Let's go take a look.

(upbeat music) - Wow, Shannon, this is a really cool telescope.

Tell us all about it.

- So this is called a reflecting telescope because it uses mirrors.

Starlight comes in from the end and it hits the mirror at the back.

Then it's reflected to a little mirror that's here behind this piece.

That reflects it out the back to the eyepiece and that's where we see it when we look through.

We have this little finder scope on the telescope to help us pinpoint objects in the sky so that we can find them and know where to point the telescope.

- This is really cool.

But what if I don't have a planetarium or a telescope at home?

- If you don't have a telescope, you could take a pair of binoculars or you can just go look at the night sky with your naked eye.

And of course you can always come visit us at our planetarium.

We'd love to see you there.

Thanks for joining us today.

Bye friends.