Astronomy Day 2007

April 21, 2007: Astronomy Day -- I finished installation of the clock drive (hanging the drive weights) Friday afternoon and tested it during a private observing session that night at Stephens Memorial Observatory. Opened on Saturday (April 21) at 6:00 PM for open house hours as advertised, but nobody showed up. The observing session, however, was quite another matter! The cool spring air was nicely transparent offering our 51 guests (between about 8:30 and 11:00 PM) very good views of Saturn and several of its moons at a time when the shadow of the ring system falling upon the planetary body gave the image "a 3D effect," as one visitor exclaimed. Someone else exclaimed that it "looks like a picture." Viewers of all ages (myself included) also glimpsed atmospheric banding and, at 255X, the Cassini Division! The Moon impressed as well many saying they had never seen anything like it. The images, by the way, were quite exquisite. And the clock drive runs flawlessly and tracks very well though I can see it operates with some speed differences depending upon what direction it is tracking. Following the Moon, low in the west, the telescope held its aim for a long time. Not unexpectedly, several of the men were fascinated by the spinning governor and gears of the clock -- one man stood there for minutes watching it! The visitors were roughly half students and half non-students and members of both groups either went out and came back with family or friends or excitedly phoned them telling them to come visit. A very common question was, when are you doing this again! Apparently students learned of the public night from an all-campus email. The public got word from a newspaper article. It was a fine night for all involved.