[Peyton-observing] Public Observing for 2015-16

[jeg at astro.princeton.edu]

That time of year again, and am making my annual call for volunteers to
help with public observing.  We have a 12-inch Meade Schmidt-Cassegrain
telescope on the roof and open it to the community once a month for
regular public observing (see the 'monthly observing events for the
public' link off the new astro.princeton.edu website -- many thanks to
Steve Bickerton for writing this set of pages).  The sky here is pretty
bright, but you can still see enough bright star clusters, nearby
galaxies, planets, emission nebulae, and colorful visual binaries to
make an interesting evening, and they are enthusiastically received by
the visitors.  This is an excellent opportunity for you to meet and talk
to a public quite interested in what we do.

I run this enterprise (with a lot of help, notably from Munan Gong,
second-in-command), but the last few years we have had a wonderful group
of volunteers -- undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, and
research staff -- who ran most of the sessions.  We will train new folks
in the use of the telescope, which is a modern machine which has
built-in catalogs and after some simple initial setup will point to
objects it knows about (many more than can be seen under Megalopolis
skies) at the operator's bidding.

There are in addition to the regular public sessions various special
requests from scout groups, classes, clubs, etc, perhaps another 10
sessions during the year. We will call for volunteers for these on an
ad hoc basis.

Please let me know if you are interested, and if you are please have a 
serious look at the public webpage and the more technical ones 
(www.astro.princeton.edu/observatory--there is also the link off the 
public page) which will tell you quite a bit about the sessions and the 
equipment.

We will have an organizational meeting in a couple of
weeks--provisionally in the evening of Wednesday, Oct 12, to go over
schedule and logistics, have a training session on the telescope, and
pizza, which I will provide.

Please let me know if you are interested and want to come to the meeting
(or just want to come to the meeting) so I have a rough headcount.
Experienced folks from previous years are, of course, more than welcome,
and help keep me honest and remember things much better than I can by
myself.

thanks much

--jim