[Peyton-observing] Public Observing 2017-18

[Luke Bouma]

Forwarding Jim's message --

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: jeg at astro.princeton.edu <jeg at astro.princeton.edu>
Date: Wed, Sep 20, 2017 at 8:21 AM
Subject: Public Observing 2017-18
To: "all at astro.princeton.edu" <all 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 of Peyton and open it to the community once a month
for regular public observing (see the 'Monthly observing events for the
public' link at the top of the the astro.princeton.edu website -- many
thanks to Steve Bickerton for writing this site).  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), 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.
Luke Bouma (bouma.luke at gmail.com) is my `second-in-command, who actually
does all the work).

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. I 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 a link off the public
page) which will tell you quite a bit about the sessions and the
equipment.

We will have organizational/training meeting (with pizza) next week on
Monday at 7:00, during which we will go over the operation of the telescope,
logistics for the sessions, etc. Please let me know if you are interested
(so I can get enough pizza ;=)). If you cannot come to the meeting, you
are still welcome in the program, and we can arrange for you to be
trained on the telescope.

For those in other departments on this list, if you could bring this to
the attention of interested students and staff in your department, it
would be greatly appreciated.

thanks much

--jim
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