Citizen Science: Wish upon a Star....

If you have any great wishes to make, tonight and tomorrow night are going to be the two best nights to view the Perseids Meteor Shower .

Each year in August stargazers get a chance to view meteors from the comet Swift-Tuttle that create 'shooting star' effects in earth's atmosphere.

A great article on Nasa's website about the meteor shower can be found here as well as the best times and locations in the sky to view it.

The meteor shower can be seen from July 17th 2009 to August 24th 2009, but peaks on August 12th.

Some superstitions say that wishing upon the first star you see will grant that wish, so make the first one a good one!

Happy Stargazing,
~Kristen

Cool Tools:Shark!!!!!!!!!!

Hi everyone, Nancy here.

I hope you all have been having a great summer. We have been very busy in the SERC. We've already sent out our first round of Durham Public Schools Science Kits to the Year Round Schools. The students are starting their year off studying life cycles of plants, animals and invertebrates.

An animal that they won't be caring for in their classrooms however is getting a lot of attention this week.

Each summer, the Discovery Channel hosts Shark Week, the longest running week of television programming focused on a particular animal. Shark Week has been a fixture of the Discovery Channel for over twenty years.

If you've been out to the Museum lately and tried your hand at digging for marine fossils out at the dig site on the Dinosaur Trail, you may have found some shark's teeth. The mix of fossil "dirt" that you can explore was excavated from a phosphate mine in Aurora, NC. North Carolina was once part of an embayment that had lots of diverse sea life. Some of the shark's teeth found in the dig site at the Museum are from Sand Tiger Sharks, Whitetip Sharks and White Sharks. Some explorers to the quarry in Aurora have been lucky enough to find Megaladon teeth.

Discovery Channel's website has a lot of great shark resources including games, videos and an identification guide. Check out the link from our friends at How Stuff Works to learn more about how sharks' teeth work. Did you know that sharks can have up to 300 teeth? They can also have anywhere between 5-15 rows of teeth.

For more information on Shark Week, you can check out Discovery Channel's website.

Stay tuned, stay curious and if you live in Amity, stay out of the water...

-Nancy