The Space and Rocket Center held an educational event for their members last Saturday night. The USSRC contacted our current VBAS president, Michael, to ask if we would support telescope observing after their indoor activities. This is the sort of thing we love to do anyway, so Michael, James, and I agreed to meet there with our telescopes. Michael always invites me to these public outreach events because he loves my telescope so much (it's barely visible in the photo on the lower right under the Mercury rocket). My scope is a homemade 10" Newtonian with a 7ft square wooden tube. It produces sharp images and people viewing through it feel that they're really looking through something substantial. James had his 8" Schmidt-Cass and Michael carried the society's 14" LX200.John Dobson, one of the most avid amateur astronomers and designer of the Dobsonian mount, a variation of which I use on my scope, said that the value of a telescope should be measured by the number of people who've looked through it. I love that. It's helped push me to seek opportunities to share my love of the skies with others. There's a wide wide universe out there and most people keep staring at their shoes.
We each settled on a different subject to view as the parents and their kids started pouring out after the indoor activities. Michael showed them Jupiter, with its four Galilean moons all on the same side of the planet that night. James had Albireo, a beautiful double star with one icy blue star and the other a golden yellow. I was on M13, the Hercules cluster. It's a globular cluster with several hundred thousand stars and is about 25,000 light years away. Albireo is about 400 light years away, and Jupiter is less than 20 light minutes away. Yeah, it's a big universe and all of these objects are in our Milky Way galaxy (although M13 is out of the galactic plane). The kids and parents both had lots of questions. Even the employees, mostly college students, had a great time. I heard several "awesome!"s and "fantastic!"s when they would take a look.
This was the first time that I took my telescope to the Space and Rocket Center and it was great fun to view the night skies from among these historic rockets. We even saw a satellite pass overhead - one that may have been launched by one of the types of rockets on display at the park.
2 comments:
This is fascinating. Do you ever take any digital photos through your telescope. That would be cool to see.
I've done sporadic photography over the past few years, but hope to do more soon. I once had a photo of Venus transiting the sun published at a NASA website.
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