04 June 2004

Vacation science

Forrest M. Mims III

Sarah Mims attaches her temperature data logger to her passenger window of the family car. Click image to enlarge.

For many families, vacation time is framed by boring intervals of travel.That's not the way vacations happen in my family! Whenever practical, we do science while driving to our destination.

Our science might be as simple as photography of landscapes, wild flowers, clouds and sunsets. We might also photograph exposed layers of soil and rocks at road cuts, especially when we take along a geological hammer to explore for fossils and rocks.

Often our science is more sophisticated.

For example, we sometimes use a non-contact infrared thermometer to accurately measure the roadside temperature across a wide variety of landscapes at all hours of day and night. (If you try this with a thermometer equipped with a laser pointer, be sure the laser is disabled before operating the unit from a car!)

By far the most interesting vacation temperature experiment from our family car, a 1994 Ford Taurus, was conducted by my daughter Sarah in 2000. Sarah used an Onset temperature logger to monitor the temperature of the ambient air along highways between Central Texas and Central New Mexico and back.

The photograph above shows Sarah mounting the temperature logger assembly on her window at White Sands National Monument after she downloaded the data and reset the instrument. Sarah's results were so interesting that I've asked her to consider writing an article for The Citizen Scientist summarizing them.

I rarely travel anywhere without a suite of instruments. It's especially interesting to monitor the background radiation using a recording Geiger counter from either a car or airplane. The latter is not so simple these days, due to security concerns and restrictions on operating electronic devices from airplane flying below 10,000 feet. As with Sarah's temperature study, the results are absolutely fascinating, and I'll describe them in a future article.

Another instrument I take along is a Sun photometer. Actually, I usually take half a dozen or so Sun photometers. These instruments permit haze to be very accurately monitored. Some of mine also measure the Earth's ozone and water vapor layers to a high degree of accuracy.

You may not want to take along serious instruments on vacation, but you can still do plenty of science with a camera, digital thermometer and maybe a GPS receiver. If you travel with children, they will find that the times passes much faster when they are conducting observations. Like Sarah, they might even get enough data for a science fair project.

The most important science during your vacation might happen at your destination. I'll never forget the time a few years ago that my family and I were in Roswell, New Mexico, for one of our periodic visits to the Roswell Museum. That amazing museum houses a reconstruction of the workshop where Robert Goddard and his team built the world's first guided, liquid-fueled rockets.

After our visit to the Roswell Museum, we decided to have some fun by visiting the big UFO museum in town. We were stunned by the number of visitors. There were at least ten times as many visitors at the UFO museum than at the Roswell Museum! How amazing that all those people traded a visit to a museum honoring the father of modern space flight for a visit to a UFO museum.

I hope you will consider the science opportunities at your vacation destination. Should you drive through Roswell, be sure to stop by the Roswell Museum with the Goddard displays.