AFY Public Night - May 17th

With gas prices hovering around $4 per gallon, it's hard to know when your hobby is worth the 150 mile round-trip...especially when the forecast is calling for rain.

May 17th was the Public Night for Astronomy for Youth, Inc., an amateur astronomy group with which I volunteer. Public Night is a chance for people from the surrounding area to come out, look through our personal telescopes and learn a little bit about astronomy. AFY's Public Night is the third Saturday of each month from March-November at Malabar Farm in Mansfield, OH.

In the past we have been lucky enough to have very dark skies and often times have seen the heart of the Milky Way with the naked eye. This year, however, our good friend the moon is keeping us company all night. For those not familiar with the night sky, the moon is a great object to observe. It's close, easy to find in a telescope or binoculars and has many interesting features to explore. However, a full, or nearly full, moon can be an astronomers worst nightmare. The full moon doesn't show many features, due to the lack of shadows on the surface. More annoyingly, the full moon reflects so much of the sun's light that the sky gets so washed out in moon glow that it is hard to make out other celestial objects such as galaxies, star clusters and nebulas. Long story short, it looks like this year will be a lesson in patience and appreciation of our beloved dark skies WITHOUT the friendly moon.

Curt, our club Treasurer, had sent an email on Friday stating that we would have a troop of Girl Scouts attending and he wanted everyone there to help, even if it was cloudy. If it rained, we would have to play it by ear. On Saturday the forecast called for clouds most of the day with a break between 7-10, just when our girls scouts would be arriving.

Meghan and I packed up the equipment and headed out around 5pm. The clouds to the north were dark and daunting, but the forecast was looking good, so maybe this was a passing storm. We were about 10 miles north of Columbus when the rain started. At 15 miles, it was a downpour and we were slowed to 45 mph on the freeway. At the 20 mile point, I nearly pulled off and headed home, scrubbing the night due to weather. However, the forecast kept nagging me and I pushed on through the rain. Slowly the rain subsided and soon the sun was shining again and the clouds began to part. After making a pit stop a Wendy's for some dinner, we arrived at Malabar Farm.

The usual suspects were there, minus Al & Stuart and we spent a good 15-20 minutes catching up and chatting about this and that. The wind was blowing at a good clip, but since the skies were almost perfectly clear, I thought I'd set-up my Meade ETX 125 and get ready for the evening. I went to grab my tripod and....CRAP! The tripod was 75 miles south in my storage closet. I felt pretty stupid for forgetting such an integral piece of equipment, but we all got a good laugh at it and I received a lot of reassurance from my fellow geeks that they had all done the same thing before.

Al & Stu arrived and everyone began setting up telescopes. Curt and Aaron were setting up one of the club's new Orion XT6 scopes and Robert offered to give a demonstration on collimating (lining up) the mirrors. I had done collimation on my Meade LX200 before, but struggled on a reflector, such as this. After a few minutes, Robert had walked us through the technique and the scope was ready to go.

Soon, the Girl Scouts arrived and we began greeting them. Their troop leader told us they needed to be in bed at 9:45 and our job was to have them thoroughly exhausted. We promised to do our best and we started by creating a scale model of the solar system. The girls were quick to pick out the order of the planets and had a blast pacing out the scale. We wrapped up the model and Curt showed them "aliens", pieces of meteorites that the club owns. Next, since the moon was starting to rise high in the sky, we demonstrated how the moon moves through it's phases and how eclipses occur. By this time Saturn and Mars were easily visible and the girls migrated among the scopes with "Oohs" and "Aahs" that naturally come from seeing these objects up close.

Several other people had arrived including a member of the Columbus Astronomical Society and his 18inch Obsession telescope. He had several people from an bird watching club with him and he was putting on a presentation of his own. Another gentleman had set-up a Meade LX50, so I wondered over to take a look. He and Stu were setting it up and Stu was helping him find Saturn. I found out he had purchased the scope three weeks prior and this was his first chance to use it. We got him set-up and decided to take a look at M13, the globular star cluster in Hercules.

Remember how I said earlier that the moon tends to wash out objects such as this? Well, not when you have a 10" light bucket like this Meade. The image was definitely light polluted, but I was easily able to distinguish individual stars on the outskirts of the cluster. He dropped in a 13mm eyepiece and the cluster nearly filled the field of view. Now, even through the moon glow, it was easy to distinguish hundreds of individual stars. For the first time since I sold my Meade LX200, I felt regret and contemplated purchasing another one. However, remembering the trek up and down three flights of steps carrying a 100 pound telescope, quickly convinced me to stick with the ETX125.

It was now around 11:30 pm and the hour long drive home was nagging at my tired body. Also, the clouds had started moving in and the views through the scopes was diminishing rapidly. I said my goodbyes and headed down the hill. We arrived home around 12:45 and took the dog out. Lightning was flashing in the distance, followed by low rumbling thunder a few seconds after. I went back inside and got ready for bed just as the storm unleashed it's fury. It wasn't anything to worry about, but it did provide some nice fireworks. It passed quickly and I drifted off to sleep as the rumblings grew quieter in the east.

"I put my head down and I dreamt you were here with me by the ol' tree, where no one could care."