The ScienceGiant

10/07/2026

October 10th (10/10) is Powers of Ten Day!

Powers of Ten Day is inspired by the classic scientific film essay by designers Charles and Ray Eames, and narrated by physicist Phil Morrison. The film is a visual journey of scale, because scale is not precisely just size, it is the RELATIVE size of things. The Powers of Ten takes the viewer from a Chicago picnic out of the solar system and Milky Way galaxy to the edge of the universe, to a field of view of 10^24 meters. And then it zooms back in and down to a subatomic scale of 10^-16 meters to see quarks in a proton of a carbon atom in a man’s hand. It’s an adventure in magnitudes and magnification.

And it’s a great segue for students to review what are SI Metric Measurements in STEM Fields? This question exploration helps Ss explain why scientists, engineers and mathematicians use the metric standard measurement system, from the elegant simplicity and worldwide success of a decimalised system with factors of ten, to the fundamental dimensions of reality as expressed by the seven metric units.

This resource includes warm-ups, worksheets with exponents and scientific notation, and recommended videos for review And it’s is in Microsoft Word .doc form so that Ts can customize the discussion to fit the needs of their Ss.
https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Question-Exploration-SI-Metric-Measurements-in-STEM-Fields-2750056

10/04/2026

Launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik on Oct. 4, 1957. 🚀🎥 The film October Sky is adapted from “Rocket Boys: A Memoir” by . 🧑‍🦱🧑‍🦰👱🧑
A heart-touching story of growing up in rural West Virginia in the late 1950’s, it chronicles teenage friends’ pursuit of amateur rocketry when their world of coal mining changed with the launch of the 1st artificial satellite.

This resource consists of three separate worksheets and a hands-on activity:
1. Questions that students should answer while watching .
2. Survey Routine on the reading the article “Big Creek Missile Agency”, the inspiration for .
3. Like/Unlike worksheet for after viewing where students can compare and contrast themselves to the characters in the film, and write short answers which can detail their developing intra-personal Intelligence.
4. 🥤🚀 Create a paper rocket which can be launched from a drinking straw – then modify the model rocket to see if Ss can make it fly even farther!
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www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/October-Sky-video-viewing-activities-3205213
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10/02/2026

NAVIGATE THE NIGHT SKY for OCTOBER 2026:
PLANET PLACEMENT, MOON MOTION, METEOR SHOWERS and the SUN SIGNS.
Navigate the night sky of the northern hemisphere and learn about astronomy! TheScienceGiant has easy-to-follow simplified monthly star maps to help Ss .
Available for FREE download at https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Navigate-the-Northern-Night-Sky-October-2026-Starmap-17817059
🌖 (♉︎) Oct 1: waning gibbous Moon at perigee (closest to Earth) distance of 369,334 km near the tip of Taurus’ horn.
🌗 (♊︎) Oct 3: Last Quarter Moon in Gemini
🌘 (♊︎) Oct 4: waning crescent Moon near the bright star Pollux in Gemini.
♄ (♓︎) Oct 4: Saturn 🪐 reaches opposition (opposite the Sun in our sky), rising at sunset in Pisces the Fish. The ringed planet is at its closest and brightest in 2026.
🌘♂️ (♋︎) Oct 5: waning crescent Moon very near Mars in Cancer.
🌘 ♃ (♌︎) Oct 6: waning crescent Moon extremely close (within 0.5°) conjunction of Jupiter in Leo. Much of the eastern United States will see the moon occult (pass in front) and eclipse the giant and its Galilean moons.
🌘 (♌︎) Oct 7: waning crescent Moon near the “heart” of Leo the Lion, the bright star Regulas.
🌑 (♍︎) Oct 10: New Moon in Virgo.
🌒♀ (♍︎): Oct 11: thin waning crescent Moon visible very near Venus in Virgo the Virgin.
🌒☿ (♎︎): Oct 12: waning crescent Moon and Mercury close to each other in Libra the Scales.
🌒(♏︎) Oct 14: waxing crescent Moon near the bright red star Antares in Scorpius
🌒 (♐︎) Oct 16: in Sagittarius the Archer, just above the “spout” of the Teapot asterism, the waxing crescent Moon at apogee (farthest from Earth) at a distance of 404,643 km.
🌓 (♐︎) Oct 18: First Quarter Moon in Sagittarius
🌔 (♑︎) Oct 19: waxing gibbous Moon in Capricornus the Sea-Goat.
🌔 (♒︎) Oct 21: waxing gibbous Moon in Aquarius the Water-Bearer.
🌠 Oct 21: Orionid meteor shower peaks. This meteor shower happens when Earth travels through the debris field trailing behind Halley's Comet, which produces very fast (67 km/sec), generally faint meteors (about 10-20 per hour) burning up in our atmosphere. With a moonless sky, you're much more likely to catch a shooting star careening through the night. The best bet to see meteors before dawn. Find a dark location after the moon has set, look to the southeast sky (if you're in the northern hemisphere). Radiant is located near the club of Orion the Hunter.
☀️ (♏︎) Oct 23-Nov 21: in tropical astrology of traditional Western zodiac, the Sun is considered to be in Scorpius the Scorpion; in sidereal astrology, the Sun is in Virgo, and astronomically the Sun in in Scorpius’s IAU boundaries for just six days, from Nov 23-28. Seeing the scorpion in this pattern of stars may date back to the Stone Age. The archaeological site Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey was inhabited from around 9500 BCE to at least 8000 BCE. It is famous for its large circular structures that contain massive stone pillars – among the world's oldest known megaliths. Pillar 43 is decorated with sculptural reliefs of a scorpion. In Hawaii, Scorpius is known as Ka Makau Nui o Māui, the demigod Maui's Fishhook (you’re welcome!).
🌔♄ (♓︎) Oct 24: waxing gibbous Moon in Pisces near Saturn
🌕 (♈︎) Oct 26: Full Moon in Aries the Ram.
🌖 (♉︎) Oct 27: waning gibbous Moon at perigee (closest to Earth) distance of 364,410 km within the Pleiades star cluster.
🌖 (♊︎) Oct 31 – Nov 1: waning gibbous Moon in Gemini between Castor and Pollux. Modern Pagans celebrate Samhain tonight at the astronomical midpoint between the autumnal equinox and winter solstice (or the full moon nearest this point) as a time to celebrate the lives of those who have died, and it often involves paying respect to ancestors, family members, elders of the faith, friends, pets, and other loved ones on the other side. It is seen as a festival of darkness, balanced at the opposite point of the wheel of the year by the spring festival of Beltane.
🌗 (♊︎) Nov 1: Last Quarter Moon in Gemini the Twins.

09/20/2026

Flying beside the storm at sunset, and watching the flashes of lightning in the clouds.

09/18/2026

🌞😎 Last Day of Summer,
🍂 First Day of Fall.
Take a and have your Ss review reasons for the seasons, solstices and equinoxes w/ my popular puzzle. You provide the picture cards, Ss solve the correct order based on the clues alone or together in teams.
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https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Logic-LineUp-Seasons-Solstices-and-Equinox-Puzzle-2978981
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☀️🌎🍁

09/13/2026

What’s all that white in the trees? Egrets!

09/01/2026

🔭 ABOUT NASA's NANCY GRACE ROMAN SPACE TELESCOPE

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is a Hubble-sized telescope that will revolutionize astronomy by building on the science discoveries and technological leaps of the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope observatory launched on Sunday morning, August 30, 2026 at 7:26 ET.

Using a wide field instrument, Roman will survey billions of galaxies and catch the light of stellar explosions to answer basic questions about dark energy, which is causing the universe’s expansion to speed up. Is cosmic acceleration caused by a new energy component or by the breakdown of general relativity on cosmological scales? If the cause is a new energy component, is its energy density constant in space and time, or has it evolved over the history of the universe?

Roman’s scans of the sky will also uncover thousands of exoplanets beyond our solar system, including types of planets never surveyed before to help answer new questions about the potential for life in the universe: How common are solar systems like our own? What kinds of planets exist in the cold, outer regions of planetary systems? What determines the habitability of Earth-like worlds

Beyond these two primary goals, Roman will probe a range of additional astrophysical and planetary science topics such as stars in neighboring galaxies, supermassive black holes in faraway galaxies, cosmic nurseries where stars and planets come to life, and small bodies in our solar system.

Roman is named after Dr. Nancy Grace Roman (1925- 2018), NASA’s first chief astronomer and one of the architects of the agency’s modern science program. Dr. Roman championed space-based observatories that could study the universe above Earth’s hazy atmosphere while making their data broadly available to the scientific community. While she’s known as the “mother” of the Hubble Space Telescope, Dr. Roman played an even broader role as the driving force behind NASA’s entire Great Observatories program.

06/07/2026

06/07/2026