[AZ-Observing] Re: Last night's GCC North Star Party
- From: Michael Collins <cal_donley@xxxxxxx>
- To: az-observing@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 08 Mar 2014 12:21:13 -0700
On 03/08/14 10:31, Jeff wrote:
> I attended the star party at Glendale Community College North last night.
> What a perfect night.
I was set up right next to Jeff, and had an equally enjoyable evening
showing people objects in the sky. His spectrascope and simplified
explanations introduced many people to a new aspect of astronomy. Jeff
also had some hand held spectrascopes that people could point to the
different types of lights visible from parking lot so they could easily
see the various types of emissions. His was an excellent example of
effective public astronomy.
> I look forward to future star parties there and high recommend them.
I was told that attendance was down a little from last year, however
the high percentage of cloud cover at sundown may have put some people
off. It was never too cloudy by dark to prevent good views of numerous
objects, and only got better as the evening progressed. I centered the
Pleiades in a 22-power field early on, then moved to the minor planet 2
Pallas when I learned that another telescope up the line was showing
M45. At magnitude 7.1, Pallas was the sixth brightest solar system
object in the sky by that point in time, after Jupiter, its four largest
moons plus one of our own. Several people commented that they'd never
seen an asteroid before, a few thanked me for showing them something
different and a some who had been by earlier we able to see that it had
visibly moved relative to the background stars in just an hour. At
various times, I also gave people a 100x view of gamma Leonis, Jupiter
(by request), and NGC 752. Near the end of the session, I saw that the
Moon would pass very near 6th magnitude BD+18 719. A couple of the
volunteers were able to see the apparent motion of the Moon directly as
it passed a few arc-seconds south of the star. From my back yard in
south Chandler, one would have seen an occultation.
Four clubs provided telescopes for this outing, to go along with the
half dozen or so belonging to the college. One of the organizers told me
that she expects to schedule a similar event near first quarter moon
next March. That would be the 27th. If you get the chance to participate
in one of these outings, I highly recommend it.
-- Mike --
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cal_donley@xxxxxxx
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