[Peyton-observing] Public observing last night

[Gaspar Bakos]

Hello all,


On Thu, Sep 17, 2015 at 3:02 PM, Munan Gong <munan at princeton.edu> wrote:
> Hi all,
> We sucessfully ran public observing last night! Alwin, Joshua and Chris came
> to help.
> Stadium light was down.

Well, sometimes half-way, all bright stadium lights came on, and were
full on for a long time. I already complained about it and Stephanie
is investigating how that could happen.


> 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".

Given their orbits almost intersect, this is about right :)

Best regards,
Gaspar


-- 
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Gaspar Bakos
Associate Professor
133 Peyton hall, 4 Ivy lane
Department of Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08544, USA
office: +1-609-258-9926 fax:+1-609-258-8226
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