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Hands-on activity: Make your own space camera
The mission
Make your own camera to learn how telescopes see the Universe.
Age range: 7-10
What you’ll need:
- A box (about as big as a shoebox will work)
- A piece of white wax paper
- Tape
- Scissors
- A small pokey thing, like a pin
- A pencil
NGSS compatibility (for U.S. teachers):
Disciplinary Core Ideas: 4-PS4-2, 4-PS4-3, MS-PS4-2, MS-PS4-3.
Science & Engineering Practices: developing and using models; constructing explanations; planning and carrying out investigations.
Crosscutting Concepts: patterns; systems and system models; cause and effect.
Background
Space telescopes might seem like complicated contraptions of lenses and mirrors, but they’re really just cameras. Here, kids build their own camera — a box that can collect light, redirect it, and record it — to learn how cameras do what they do, whether part of a smartphone or the Hubble Space Telescope.
Along the way, they’ll learn how light travels through space. Afterward, they’ll be able to appreciate breathtaking space images like the one below in a whole new light.
This activity works best if it’s sunny outside.
1
If your box has a lid, tape it shut.
2
Figure out which side of your box is smallest. Fold or cut that side to have a big hole in it.
3
Cover the hole you’ve made with a piece of wax paper. Fold the ends of the wax paper down the sides of the box and tape it in place.
- You can cut the paper so it’s smaller and easier to tape down. It just needs to completely cover the hole.
4
Use tape to cover any other holes in the box.
- We don’t want light getting in through a gap somewhere.
5
On the side of the box opposite the hole that’s covered in paper, use your pokey thing to make a hole right in the middle.
- The hole should be small!
6
With the paper side facing you, hold the box up against a window that has curtains. Wrap the curtains around the sides of the box.
- Now it should be dark enough to see whatever’s outside projected onto the wax paper — except upside down!
- WARNING: Do not use the box to look directly at the Sun!
🔭 Why is it upside down?
Unless light hits something, it travels in a straight line. Since the hole that lets light into our box is so tiny, it can only let in a little bit of light from whatever’s perfectly across from it. But things that aren’t perfectly across from your paper can still send light through the hole at an angle, like in the picture below.
Light from things that are above the hole passes through the box in a diagonal line, ending up below the hole by the time it reaches the wax paper. The opposite happens for light from things that are below the hole: traveling in a diagonal line, they end up above the hole by the time they reach the wax paper. The result is an image that’s upside-down.
7
If you’d like, have a friend stand outside and pose.
8
Once you’re done taking pictures, use your pencil to widen the pinhole in your box.
- What happens to the images you see now? They should look brighter, but blurrier.
Explanation: The image is brighter because more light is coming through the bigger hole, but it’s blurrier because now there are more paths that light can take from outside the hole through to the wax paper. This means light from things that are farther apart outside can come through the hole and still land on your wax paper close together, so they overlap. The overlapping makes it harder to tell where one thing begins in your image and another thing ends.
9
Now that you know how cameras work, you can learn more about why pictures of space look the way they do. For instance, why are there no stars in the pictures astronauts took on the Moon? What’s the biggest camera on Earth? Or, check out our coolest space pictures.