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'Tis a gift to be simple ...

Demonperformer

By Demonperformer
in The Astro Lounge

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Demonperformer

Demonperformer

Posted
Posted

Last night I did the long-awaited follow-up with the cubs, having given them a talk in February for their astronomer's badge, I took the telescope to their camp to "show them stuff".

I had worried long and hard about exactly what I was going to show them, as I didn't know what the lie of the land would be, but finally settled on "keeping it simple". Decided I would plug the canon into the slt and show them the results on the laptop (would have preferred Mk-I eyeballing, but did not want problems with them grabbing the scope and messing up the alignment.)

Summer Triangle overhead, so directed them to that, identifying each of the stars, then got them to check out the stars in the middle. At the start of the evening there weren't many, but then took a pic of the Albireo region. Lots of "wows" as they saw all the stars in that small patch of sky. Then cut the exposure time to show them the colour contrast in Albireo itself. Got requests to see a cluster (M39 was handy) and Neptune (don't know where that came from, but fitted in well with my current project - I could point at one of the seemingly same points of light on the pic and say with confidence "That one is Neptune") Then I showed them M31. All of this was interspersed with Perseid meteors, and as it got darker I was able to show them the Milky Way (not approaching cloud as some had suspected). At the end of the evening (when the cubs had all gone to their tents and there were just some leaders left), Jupiter was putting in his appearance, so I let them have a look through the eyepiece. If I had planned that bit I would have taken a better eyepiece than my 32mm S4000, but that was the only negative to the evening.

All-in-all, I think that programme went as well as trying to cram in planetary nebs, globular clusters, or any one of the other 101 things I could have included. And it was good to be reminded of exactly how amazing some of these "ordinary" objects to an astronomer can be to those who are not familiar with them when they see them for the first time.

Keeping it simple paid off.

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