Ford Amateur Astronomy Club short recap of HJRO first week of this month

I skipped a few brief opportunities in the past couple of days to observe. This was due to the cold weather and a bit of sniffles. I decided to stay warm, rest up and wait for the next observing event at the observatory.

I wrote and article for this months star stuff newsletter, it's basically a write up about what has been happening at HJRO from my perspective.

I wrote about the observing events in relation to an entire week of observing.

Basically we had the Monday visit of scouts, lphs astronomy club members and Faac. Then I went observing on Tuesday with Faac members who provided telescopes at the Wayne library for an astronomy presentation there. The presentation was given by Faac club president Gordon Hanson.

Then Wednesday I did some image experiments at HJRO and had a fellow Faac member call up and then show up to take some photos with his canon Eos slr camera.

Then thursday, Art Parent and Sandra Macika, both Faac members showed up and we did a bit of observing. Sandra pulled out her drawing pad and did a sketch of Jupiter while looking through the eyepiece.

To draw a sketch of planet you don't just take a peek and draw it from memory, you need some serious eyepiece time and Sandra sat in the observing chair and sketched for several minutes while Art and I sat and chatted about many astronomy subjects and my wish list of the moment.

Then Friday we had an observing night for the Lincoln Park High School Astronomy club. The name of the school club is "astronomy club". In the old days we had a club at the junior high and we had only a few high school members who stayed in the club. The name of the first astronomy club was actually,the "Lincoln Park Astronomy Club" which when you think about it was a name that sounded like a club name for the entire city. We didn't really have a city astronomy club however. Some clubs like the Warren club in Warren Michigan, have the city name in their club names.

Here is a photo of the Tuesday observing event from Tuesday the forth of this month.

This was a photo of some club members who showed up to setup telescopes. There were a lot of young kids at the event at the Wayne Library. They were very excited about the event and a few were ready to run around and had a lot of energy. It seems that it might be better to have two astronomers per telescope instead of one per scope when a lot of small kids are present, that gives one astronomer the chance to constantly watch the telescope and the other volunteer can chat with people in line and answer questions. We might experiment with this kind of setup in future events when many young kids are present. That won't be necessary for older observers like the new club however.

There may be an ideal observing and star party setup, we probably haven't figured that out with an organized approach however. There is to much chance for random and independent operation of each telescope which is parr of the fun of the event. Everyone has their own idea of how to improve these events, but often each event is not controlled or run in a very organized manner. I tend to wander and tend toward a more chaotic mode of operation. This means I favor letting everyone kind of go their own way, and that can have it's drawbacks at times.

I still don't know how to best use the iPad at an event, it can become such an interesting distraction at times I end up showing small groups the iPad and astronomy software on that

(Six Faac astronomers at an astronomy event at the Warren Library.)






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