[Peyton-observing] Public observing last night

Munan Gong munan at princeton.edu
Thu Sep 17 15:02:27 EDT 2015


Hi all,
We sucessfully ran public observing last night! Alwin, Joshua and Chris
came to help.
Stadium light was down. About 25 people came. Lots of kids especially in
the beginning. We saw Neptune, Uranus, M31, M15, ring nebular, dumbell
nebular, double cluster, Alberio. Minor problems: We couldn't find the
eyepiece with bigger magnification for EpsilonLyra, also failed to fit the
OIII filter to the eyepiece for ring nebular. But all in all, it was a very
fun session.
One of the (6 years old?) kid is amazing! He anwered the question of what's
a cluster as "a group of star close together and also move together in the
galaxy". He says "The sun is going to turn into a white dwarf. A white
dwarf is very very dense - it has the radius of the earth and the mass of
the Sun!" I remembered Neptune's distance wrong, (I said 40 AU but it is
30), and when I said it takes the light to travel ~5 hours from the Sun to
Neptune, he would say "It can't be - the light takes 5 hours to travel from
the Sun to Pluto". Anyway, I expect to see him ending in our department in
some ~15 years later.... :)
Cheers,
Munan
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