Wednesday, October 5, 2016

#63 - Wednesday, October 5, 2016 - Show-and-Tell

About five of us brought out our telescopes to this nighttime show-and-tell for a class of high school students.  It was clear to begin with with some clouds to the west, but the clouds worked their way across the entire sky, and didn’t clear up until after we’d all packed up, of course.  The crescent moon was beautiful – you could even see the earthshine naked-eye!  I snagged a five-minute video of it before switching back over to the eyepiece for the students.   I briefly showed them Saturn before it became covered in clouds, and then spent the rest of the evening hunting down something, anything to look at.  I showed one boy the Ring Nebula, and he expertly finagled his wheelchair between the tripod legs.  I showed a few other students globular cluster M15.  But that was about it; the southeastern sky was clear for a while, but there wasn’t anything there we could see.  So instead I did a little show-and-tell of my astrophotography.  Club member Phil tracked a few satellites and rocket bodies with his refractor as well.  There was an ISS pass, and an Iridium flare, but they were both behind the clouds.  A bit of a disappointing evening, but at least we managed to see a couple of things.  There were about 10 high schoolers in attendance, as well as their teacher.

Moon, Nikon D5300 (I think) on my C8, f/6.3 focal reducer
5m3 video, not sure how many frames were stacked, or what the ISO/shutter speed was

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