On Wednesday evening the Secondary da Vinci Club enjoyed an Astronomy evening. After four weeks of learning about the night sky, how to set up and use a telescope, the students got to practice these skills and then view a range of mid-winter targets, including Mars, 47 Tucanae and Omega Centauri, in addition to satellite spotting and an introduction to celestial navigation - how to work out where south is, using the Southern Cross.

Many thanks to Mr Hillyer for running this rotation and getting the students prepared for the event. Thank you to Mrs Budas for ongoing technical support and our guest Astronomer ‘Adrian’ for setting up our large telescope and running through several key astronomical objects. A fantastic way to finish the current da Vinci Club rotations for the term.

Well done to our mini-satellite construction team. On the final session for the term, the cubesat project wrapped up with withdrawing the ‘remove before flight’ tag and discovering we had power, were receiving telemetry and imaging from the camera was functioning. The next step for our satellite team, will be to investigate how to interpret the data and being able to use the cubsat in various investigations and projects and to become our ‘Project Managers’ training up a fresh technical team.

All our da Vinci Club students are looking forward to being able to continue extension work with fresh rotations commencing next term.

Mark Gargano

Secondary da Vinci Club Coordinator