Volunteer Mason Kruse demonstrates a toy for Abel McKee, 4, of Cincinnati, during the Allen County Museum’s Space Day celebration Saturday. This type of toy was one of several taken into space to test how well it would work in a zero-gravity environment.
LIMA — Museums are usually a place where people look back at their history. On Saturday, however, the Allen County Museum was a place for families to look up to the heavens during the museum’s Space Day family event.
With the total solar eclipse coming to Lima April 8, event organizers at the museum wanted to take advantage of the growing excitement ahead of the event to offer a fun day for families while educating them, as well.
“The funny thing was, we got these space-related science kits from COSI, and because they were space-related, I was trying to figure out what I could do with them,” Allen County Museum Curator of Education Sarah Rish said. “Then, knowing there was the eclipse coming, it felt like the perfect time.”
To that end, the Space Day at the museum focused not just on the eclipse but on space in general, featuring activities like working with toys taken into space to see how they would react in zero gravity or learning about radio signals, with help from the Northwest Ohio Amateur Radio Club.
The Lima Astronomical Society was also on hand Saturday to educate attendees on the upcoming eclipse, including what makes this particular eclipse so special for our region and how to safely view the eclipse next month.
“The museum reached out to us and we’re more than happy to lend our knowledge and background to getting information on the eclipse out to everybody,” LAS president Joshua Crawford said. “We’re talking about what ingredients go into creating an eclipse and what needs to happen to line things up just right to make it happen.”
With the next total eclipse not coming to this area until 2099, this eclipse will be a once-in-a-lifetime event for the majority of people in this area, and Crawford hopes that educational events like this one will help people get the most out of this experience.
“We understand, you know, that it’s not for everyone,” he said. “Not everyone is science-minded. But at the same time, we want to bring this message to you as much as possible that there are going to be people who aren’t very excited about this until the day of it, but then they might see it and say, ‘Okay, I get it now.’”
