Quick tour for the neighbours

[ShrewView]

For one reason or another it’s been a while since I’ve done much Astro even though we’ve had some good clear spells. So, when my next-door neighbour recently said they’d love to bring their two young lads to have a look through a telescope and with last night being forecast clear, I set up two scopes and I invited them round for a quick tour of the sky.

Thinking about it I should have planned it a bit better as there were lots of things I wished I shown them, but in the end we just did a few of the obvious ones like M31, M42, the Pleiades and a few other nice bright stars groups. They’d heard of “Beetlejuice” so was able to show them that and they seemed to really enjoy it all with remarks like “ooh their just like little diamonds” and "ooh I can see how you'd get hooked on this". They also discovered the trick of averted vision for getting a bit more from the faint things.

The biggest wows and oohs for them though were reserved for the surface of the moon and the fact that they could see the unlit part of the disc and the surprise when two satellites crossed the field of view when they were looking at Orion.

After they’d gone, I settled down to a spot of peaceful observing myself and just spent some time around Orion and seeing how many stars I could count with unaided eye. It was good to be back out there!

[wookie1965]

It's great to show people new exciting views the wows make it worth it's while. 

[Paz]

Some of my best memories are showing other people the sights. The moon has always had the biggest wows, followed closely by Saturn and then Jupiter.