[Peyton-observing] Public observing October 2nd

[Petchara Pattarakijwanich]

Hi everyone,

We had the first public observing session of the semester last night. There were about 30 people show up, several were young kids. They all showed up at the beginning, so it was a somewhat chaotic start. After a while some of them left so we were down to a manageable number and everything went smoothly.

The sky was clear of cloud but was somewhat hazy. The stadium had some event scheduled until 11pm, so the light was full on all the time. Combined this with the haze, the sky was basically flat white. Anyway, even with the bad condition and the fact that all the interesting planets are all down (we only had Uranus and Neptune), I think the night was pretty eventful. We looked at a few binary stars such as Mizar, Albireo and epsilon-Lyrae. Then we went on to star clusters, globular clusters and finally Andromeda galaxy which was barely. We of course caught Uranus and Neptune at some point.

One lesson that we learned the hard way is the following: Don't look at epsilon-Lyrae when there are too many people. The system is nice to see, but to resolve it to 4 stars one needs to get the focus exactly right. Of course the general public does not know how to adjust the focus, so each person would take too much time, holding up the queue. Many people never got it right and that ended in some frustration. In the end we just switched the target to Albireo which was much better. Toward the end of the night, when we were down to about 5 people, we went back there again. This time, with more time to play with the telescope, everyone got it and was happy.

Cheers,
Pete
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