Reid Middle School Youth Capture the Colorful Cosmos Online Exhibition
Feb 2017–Reid Middle Schoolers used the Smithsonian-Harvard Astrophysical Observatory’s robotic telescopes to take images of the cosmos. Students in Matt Warrington’s 6th grade STEM class and 7th and 8th graders in art teacher Jessica Karr’s digital art class compared how the human eye and the telescopes capture images. The students used robotic telescopes to explore the universe and requested images of those areas they “captured.” They colorized their own images of stars and galaxies in the same way professional astronomers do, and wrote poetry inspired by images captured by the Hubble Telescope. As a capstone project, the students created watercolor and acrylic paintings for this on-line exhibit that were inspired by the images they captured through the robotic telescopes.