This past Tuesday night, I did an outreach event with a few astronomy club members (Phil, Terry, and Sarah) out at a soccer complex a short drive from where I live. As per usual, I brought out my 8-inch Celestron Schmidt-Cassegrain on my Celestron NexStar SE mount, which is an alt-az mount that is not ideal for photography, but is great for outreach due to its ease of setup and use. The telescope, however, is excellent - planets are large and well-resolved due to its long focal length and large aperture, and with a focal reducer attached, I can pull in some gorgeous nebulae, galaxies, and globular clusters that are sure to please the crowd.
It wasn't a totally clear sky, and it was a little hazy, but it was clear enough to hit the important targets: the planets! The general public don't typically have the appreciation for small, dim, fuzzy galaxies that we star-nerds do, but boy are the planets awesome at the eyepiece. And this summer is a bountiful harvest of planets indeed - Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn are all readily visible, and if you wait till later in the evening, you can nab Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto too if you're somewhere dark enough, have a big enough scope, and know what you're looking at. (I have not, in fact, tried for Pluto yet. I need to. Soon.)
Not only did we have the planets, but we also had a rather fetching view of the crescent Moon before it set. I threw my QHY5 guide camera on for a couple quick videos early on in the evening, and they came out really nice! Despite the haze, which reduced transparency, the seeing (atmospheric steadiness) was actually pretty good.
Date: 14 August 2018
Object: Moon
Camera: QHY5
Telescope: Celestron C8
Accessories: N/A
Mount: Celestron AVX
Frames: 106/500
Exposure: 25 ms
Stacking program: RegiStax 6
Date: 14 August 2018
Object: Moon
Camera: QHY5
Telescope: Celestron C8
Accessories: N/A
Mount: Celestron AVX
Frames: 1: 109/460
Exposure: 25 ms
ISO/Gain: N/A
Stacking program: RegiStax 6
This outreach event had several young kids in attendance with their parents, which is always a treat. Oftentimes, neither the kids nor the parents have looked through a telescope before, and that is truly a magical moment.
Occasionally, I get kids that come through who have some knowledge of the planets already, which they are eager to show off, and that is really fun. Tonight, I had a special guest - a 7-year-old girl named Makenna who was absolutely enthralled with the telescope. We looked at Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars first, and a few bright stars were easily visible through the haze, which she also wanted to see. Now, for most of us, stars are not terribly exciting in the eyepiece, unless it's a tight double star or a lovely open cluster or something like that. But to Makenna, seeing a star in the eyepiece was like magic. She asked if she could control the telescope, and I let her punch the keys on the hand controller, which was very exciting for her. Finally I just let her scroll through the star catalog and select stars at random, most of which I wasn't familiar with, and it was anyone's guess as to whether we'd be able to see them or not - whether they were far enough up above the cloud bank off in the distance (I had the filter turned on to keep it from going below the horizon). Oftentimes, however, a telescope with a large enough aperture can pick up all kinds of stuff you can't see through the clouds because of its light-gathering power. I also directed her to see some double stars, like Mizar and Alcor. I pulled in a few deep sky objects as well, although there weren't many to choose from in the light-polluted suburbs, so one of them was the Ring Nebula. Our exchange went something like this:
"So this is called the Ring Nebu--"
"OOOH"
"It's a dying star--"
"DYING?!"
"In about 5 billion years, our own Sun--"
"WOW!"
😁😁😁😁
I also told her about how I'm a scientist and get to discover new things. Before she left (we almost had to pry her off the telescope), she told her parents that she wanted to be a scientist. Be still my heart!!
I didn't get home until nearly midnight, so getting up for work the next morning was a little rough, but it's worth every minute of lost sleep!
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