Observing with a primary school

[Gfamily]

Mrs G works with a local primary school and one of their years was having a 'residential' week locally. 

As the forecast seemed reasonable, we'd said we'd take some kit out so they might get some astronomy while they were in a less urban area. 

With the scopes and a pair of binoculars, we were able to 'wow' the pupils with the Moon, Jupiter and the Orion Nebula .

Handy hint: if observing with young people; - put a chair backwards onto the telescope, tell the observer to put their hands on the chair-back, and they won't grab the eyepiece to look through it. 

 

Edited February 23 by Gfamily

[John]

5 minutes ago, Gfamily said:

Handy hint: if observing with young people; - put a chair backwards onto the telescope, tell the observer to put their hands on the chair-back, and they won't grab the eyepiece to look through it..... 

That is an excellent hint. I will use that approach when I'm next doing outreach with younger observers (and I think it might be useful for some older ones as well !) 🙂

[Gfamily]

6 minutes ago, John said:

That is an excellent hint. I will use that approach when I'm next doing outreach with younger observers (and I think it might be useful for some older ones as well !) 🙂

I said to some of the pupils that it was also useful when talking to older people!

Edited February 23 by Gfamily

[RobertI]

Must have been very a rewarding evening. Good tip on the chair, I’ll remember that one. 

[Carbon Brush]

Yes giving them somewhere to put their hands is very good advice.
Much better than 'eyes are for looking - fingers are for touching'.
I once had a visitor to my shed who without warning grabbed the scope tube and swung it to look through.
Strangely the object centred in the fov did not follow the scope🤔
A little annoying as slippng the mount clutches meant I lost alignment on the goto😡

[Peter Drew]

We do this every Saturday night.  Good advice about the chair position, we used to do this but now use a short step mount that has a large hoop at the top for the kids to hold on to.

Fortunately we have such a large mount for our main outreach telescope that a kid or adult grabs the eyepiece nothing moves.  Another issue that can be addressed is eyepiece focusing, adults with all manner of eyesight anomalies use the telescope and we try to encourage them to operate the focuser for the best result, kids seem to have enough accommodation to cope.    🙂