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!

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.

Getting ready for some observing on Nantucket

Tonight I got the 8" dob carefully collimated just to see how Saturn looked in it since the clouds have finally cleared out. It was beautiful as usual. At 180X I could easily see the gap between the rings and the planet even thought the ring tilt is only a few degrees. I put in a 9mm UO with 2X barlow which gave 266X and the view was spectacular, including cloud belts and at least four pinpoint moons. The Hyperions are great, but when you look at the moons, the Orthoscopic EP is clearly the winner, even over the WO Super Planetary.

This weekend is a work weekend in Nantucket, but I have an 8" dob down there and hope to do some observing during the new moon night on Saturday - right after I put in the new tile in Little Pines...

Saturn on the Sidewalk

Tonight I had some books to return to B&N so I set up the 4" refractor on the sidewalk outside the store in Newington. About 30 people came by in 90 minutes to see Saturn and Titan. Naturally I told everyone what I have just learned about Titan and the Huygens probe in 2007. I need to get some pictures of what Huygens saw. People were really happy to see both Saturn and Titan. In fact the manager of the store came out for a look, and then sent all his employees out for a peek.

Talking about Cassini

Last Friday night I had the honor and pleasure to give a talk on the Cassini-Huygens mission at the newly dedicated McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center in Concord.

I was not expecting this, but at the last minute our Astronomy club (New Hampshire Astronomical Society) got a call that the original speaker could not make it, and could we cover the talk.

The club's Educational Outreach Committee (which is fairly new, having met only about four times) came together in the clutch. One member set up web conferences so we could work on the presentation together. Another contacted Jane Houston Jones, JPL Outreach Senior Coordinator for the Cassini mission, who provided us with endless material. On Wednesday I put together an outline of the talk and that evening members of the committee signed up for various sections. Then each person combed through all the JPL presentations looking for the slide or video that best described each item, from launch through the Huygens probe landing on Titan, to the icy moons, Saturn itself, its rings, and finally the Equinox extended mission plans.

Three of us met at Panera's in Concord at 5pm on Friday and went over the talk, had a quick bowl of soup and then headed over to the Discovery Center. We had about 30 people attending including a troop of Boy Scouts who asked the most (and best) questions. We ended the evening with two NHAS members outside operating three scopes so all the kids and parents could see Saturn for real. It was a great ending to a really enjoyable evening.

Shuttle Discovery Launch from Rye, NH, and ISS pass

The shuttle launched tonight from Florida, and my son Jason called me to tell me he'd seen it go up (he lives in Orlando). Sure enough, about 8 minutes later we saw it from the beach in Rye, in the distant southeast, and watched it until it disappeared in the northeast.

Then about 30 minutes later, along came the International Space station, which Discovery will rendezvous with in 2 days. Here's a picture (60 second exposure) of the ISS going past Orion's belt. The exposure ended by lucky chance just as the ISS had reached the belt. Notice the small brightening along the streak - must be a glint from a window or a solar panel. If you look carefully you can see how the stars, normally pinpoints of light, have become streaks due to the earth's rotation. The camera was mounted on a photo tripod which did not make any counter-motion to the rotation of the earth as a telsecopic mount might do. Several families happened to be there so we made it a sidewalk astronomy night too!

Outreach at the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center

The NH Astronomical Society has a long-standing relationship with the Christa McAuliffe Planetarium, where we provide public skywatches on the first Friday of every month.

Last Friday was extra special, because it was the grand opening and dedication of the new McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center, which includes the original planetarium and much more including an observation dome with a 14" Celestron Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope.

Although there were some clouds, we had a mostly clear night with around one hundred visitors between 6pm and 10pm. Four members of the NHAS had scopes set up, ranging in size from 4" refractors to 12" reflectors. Since the famlies were attending the opening of the Discovery Center, this was a very science-literate group and many of the kids knew a lot about the planets and moon already. We showed them Venus and explained why it was showing as a crescent, the lunar terminator and why craters were more clearly visible near sunrise on the moon, Saturn's rings, several star clusters, and a few other objects.