Monday, May 11, 2009

Astronomy Day!







NHAS (the NH Astronomical Society) sponsored a big exhibit at the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center on May 2. For the first time NHAS also offered an indoor session in addition to the outdoor display that we always sponsor (well, this is my first year participating!)


Indoors we did a lot of "educating" of the young ones, while outdoors some real demos, explanations, solar scopes, magnification demonstrations, and other hands-on activities really got folks interested.

Great day!

















It was a lot of fun, both inside and out. The pictures tell the story best!






Friday, May 1, 2009

Moon and Saturn on the Sidewalk in Portsmouth, NH







Wednesday evening was a beautiful, clear, calm and fairly warm night so I decided to try something new - set up two telescopes myself for some sidewalk astronomy - one for the Moon and one for Saturn.






Normally this would be difficult because I'd have to be bouncing back and forth between scopes, but I recently purchased (at NEAF, the North East Astro Fest) the Vixen SkyPod. The SkyPod is a neat little alt-az mount with tracking and it's own built-in computer, the Vixen Starbook-S.






Over the weeks since NEAF I worked a bit with the SkyPod and its manual, and got the basic functions down. I also tightened up the backlash on both axes using instructions from Mike Fowler at Vixen Optics. This reduced the play in the azimuth axis quite a bit.






How did it work on the sidewalk? Just great! I put a William Optics 80mm refractor on it, aligned it to the moon and did an "align" operation, then it kept the moon in the field of view pretty much all night, almost three hours. I tweaked it a bit about once an hour, or moved it to focus on a new part of the terminator, but it was a very helpful piece of gear. I could just point people to it and say 'take a look at the moon' while I operated the 8" Orion XT dobsonian and kept it pointed at Saturn. (I have a platform for the XT8 but I was too lazy to set it up.)






I had over fifty visitors in the three hours, including a little girl of about 4 years just recently adopted from Russia, who spoke no English but could certainly understand that beautiful view of the moon. I will never forget her big eyes when she saw it.






To top the night off, my first visitor came back with some Pizza just as I was packing up. That made a nice snack on the way home.