Astronomy at the Beach was a lot of Fun Friday

I had a lot of fun as many did at Astronomy at the Beach Friday night. I was out until almost 1AM at the site. I didn't get home until 4AM.

I didn't spend any time watching the lectures. I like to attend and hear, but tried to get footage of telescope setups and talk the the astronomers at the beach. I also tried to quickly setup and show a few folks the sky through my binocular setup. Although my tripod is not very good for the binocular Telescope so I focused on only showing two objects.

I would have loved to look through more telescopes during the event, but of course you're either looking through other scopes, or showing your own. Or in my case, taking a few photos and some video clips. I tried to do a little bit of everything and that kept me pretty busy.

There are some excellent photos on the FAAC site that Greg Ozimek took. They capture a lot of the spirit of the event and are much more wide ranging than the memory video I took.

There's also a video that focuses on the WSU lectures on Friday night.

The link to that is as follows:

http://thesouthend.wayne.edu/index.php/article/2010/09/videowayne_state_visits_astronomy_at_the_beach

I will edit and submit some video for the FAAC show if they want to use any of it. The FAAC cable show producer was there and shot his own video, so it's difficult to say if he will be able to use any of the short segment or clips I might provide.

I need to do a voice over and put some music perhaps over some of the clips and will put a note about the video clips here when I have something ready for some YouTube viewing.

Everyone that was a visitor that I saw was really nice and they were all very kind and thanked us for letting them look through the telescopes.

As for Saturday, it rained. I don't know if they cancelled the Saturday event. I didn't go out there, one of the astronomers I know headed home at 4PM after attending a lecture that was only open for astronomers. He said it was raining buckets out there and he wondered if they'd cancel the Saturday event, because he doubted anyone would show up.

They had 3500 people attend the event on Friday.

Some of the Astronomers I know arrived late, and they setup late. There were fewer vendor tables this year than in the past, perhaps a sign of the tough economic times.