What I've Seen on Wallcharts

Friday September 29, 2006

This week The Guardian have been giving away free wallcharts every day. Again. And again I have bought The Guardian every single day, going crazy for wallcharts. I realised, not the last time they did this but possibly the time before, that I already had enough wallcharts. But I just can’t resist them.

My daughter has the best wallcharts on her bedroom wall, such as butterflies, and keeps the second best wallcharts in her room but folded up for reference, such as trees. What we call ‘scary’ wallcharts, such as the recent spiders and slugs are filed away safely. This week I decided to actually look carefully at The Guardian wallcharts rather than either hand them out to whoever in the family I think will be the most interested, leave them lying around the house or accidently put them out with the recycling.

Monday: Clouds
I learn that my favourite type of cloud is called the Cirrocumulus, a type of cloud appearing in bands or ripples across the sky. It looks a little like an unidentified flying object.
Unfortunately, none of the cirrocumulus clouds I can find on the web, including Wikipedia’s take on it, look anything like the one on my wallchart.

I track one down in the end. It’s this:

Cirrocumulus cloud

Tuesday: Planets
I was looking forward to this one to see what they did about Pluto. As we all now know, Pluto has recently lost its planet status and been demoted to a dwarf planet.

The Planets wallchart features all eight bona fida planets of the solar system, but also features a Dwarf Planet section including Pluto, 2003 UB313 and Ceres. I found out that Pluto has not yet been visited by any probe from Earth although one should reach there in 2015. Poor old Pluto, rid of its planet status and we haven’t even visited yet.

I like this new classification of dwarf planets. There’s room for scope, with more hopefully being added as we go on. For years, the solar system was a little too closed and final for me. I particularly liked the disclaimer on this wallchart:
“The information presented is subject to change as new discoveries are made.”
Conclusion: astronomy’s just got exciting again.

Ceres below. Whoops, wrong Ceres.

Ceres

Wednesday: Stars in the night sky

This is one’s more astrology than astronomy. I’d tried to excite my daughter with the planets on Tuesday but I was unable to articulate just why I found it interesting that Jupiter took nearly twelve years to orbit the Earth and that is was over ten times larger than Earth. I just couldn’t convey the spectacular enormity of the solar system. With the astronomy wallchart however, we both found it interesting that somebody somewhere observed stars in the sky and made pictures out of them, a dragon here and a bear there. This has become our favourite wallchart.

Below: The Great Bear (artist’s impression)

The Great Bear

Thursday: The history of life on Earth

A big one then. Unfortunately this has already been consigned to our ‘scary’ wallchart collection. There is just too much of a melting pot of prehistoric creatures here. There’s also another disclaimer, something about this not being the definitive collection of all species of life on Earth. A much larger wallchart for that I suspect.

Oh well. I particularly like the Devonian period. When we were still in the sea and very unfriendly looking.

Below: a fossil of a huntonia from this period, not as scary as the artist’s impression of the real thing

Huntonia

Friday: Gemstones and minerals

I find myself going straight to the disclaimer, and yes, this isn’t a definitive collection either. There’ll be more of this type of wallchart in the future I bet. I suspect Gemstones and minerals will go on the wall next to butterflies.

Below: opal

Opal

Well that’s it, a week of Guardian wallcharts and I’m only £3.50 worse off. Although I noticed today that the Daily Mail have started doing wallcharts too…

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