Rancho Viejo Star Party -- photos!

[Ad Astra]

Hi Folks,

A great night last night (Cinco de Mayo!) for a star party! Over 60 of my astronomy students took 9 telescopes and 15 pairs of 7x50 bins and a couple dozen planisphere star charts out to one of the local middle schools (It's pronounced "vee Ay ho" ) and hosted several hundred kids and their parents at the school's annual science fair event. After the science fair, there are games and science related contests (like the water-bottle rocket launch and mousetrap catapult competition!), as well as hot dogs and chips and such.

My kids set up after 7:30, while I gave a (very short!) talk on "Dark Matter and Dark Energy" in the auditorium. As soon as it was dark enough, we all adjourned to the athletic field where the telescopes and bins were waiting.

We didn't have anything fancy, seven 150mm f/8 Dobsonians, two 150mm f/4.5 Dobs, and all those 7x50 bins. We set up the scopes across the field, but we gave the bins to our 'binocular ambassadors' who wandered around the crowd, offering people a go at the Moon, or at the nice clusters in Sirius, and the Mel 101 cluster in Coma Berenices. Star chart folks took their planispheres about, showing kids and adults how to use them and pick out the constellations for themselves. We also had two people there with Green Laser Pointers (adult students from the college group!) who pointed out the various constellations and such.

Observation went from roughly 8-9 pm, and with over 60 well trained astronomers there on hand, we had all equipment checked back in and secured by 9:30. Kids and parents were thrilled, some of them made a point of coming up to me and mentioning that they had been coming to these events for 3 years now, and their youngster would be moving up to the high school next year and ready for astronomy class!

My students were all amazed how much fun it was to teach someone else and show off what they knew, rather than laboring over the Professor's exercises!

I've put up a few pics below, some of the setup process, a couple of the old duffer outgassing, and then some night shots of the crowd. These were all taken by my lab aid, so I apolgise in advance for the photo quality. They are the best of a rather bad lot. Still, I do love the center one - the woman with the eyepiece case is on of my students from College, the little girl with her is her daughter - who has been bugging mom to take her out to an astronomy night all semester!

Dan

[Ad Astra]

A couple more photos -

Some of the old astronomy duffer outgassing while the troops set up the equipment out back, and a couple of crowd shots from the evening.

Dan

[JonH]

Sounds like you had a great evening Ad, nice pics too!

[adamsp123]

Excellent, looked a cracking event, wish we had your weather!

[Ad Astra]

Hello Pete,

The weather was indeed excellent - warm high pressure system (High temp of 92 F) drove all the clouds away and the skies were very clear. In spite of too many parking lot lights nearby, I had no trouble making out 3 of four stars in the bowl of Ursa Minor, and could get the 4th (nu Ursa Minoris - mag 5) with averted vision.

Seeing was very steady, (3.5/5) and transparancy was excellent.

Since the kids we were hosting were a bit younger, we didn't try anything more difficult than some of the bigger open clusters and a couple of double stars in Leo -- mostly lower power observing.

Jon, I'll pass your photo complements along to my aid! He'll be thrilled, as he doesn't get as many complements from his demanding professor!

Dan

[Viv]

Sounds brilliant !!

Nice to have to many people turn out & join in.

Congrats !

[brantuk]

Looks and sounds like a fabulous event - nice to see this sort of thing so well done with such a great turn out. WTG!

[Coco]

Sounds to me like a happy occasion had by all

.

[Ad Astra]

The school did a nice write up on our star party event this week. They are touting it to the public on the school website <HERE>

Nice to see some 'official' support for these activities!

Dan

[skywatcher1701]

looks like you had a good turn out, well done, wish our schools did more things like this!

[Ad Astra]

Hi Skywatcher!

Sadly, our schools don't do things like this - I do. Ok, I'm a teacher, but my role in these things is really just to be the local fellow with the astronomy kit who makes a few calls and gets ahold of the local science teacher and says: "Oy! What about a star party for your kids!!! You bring the crumb crunchers, and I'll bring the astro gear!"

The response is almost always enthusiastic.... but it isn't anything special on my part. You can do it, too! We never stand so tall as when we stoop to improve the life of a child.

Dan

looks like you had a good turn out, well done, wish our schools did more things like this!