We had a great time at Hector J Robinson observatory last Monday

There was so much going on, but unfortunately we had thick cloud cover and couldn't observe.

We had a lot of video clips taken by the Faac cable show and by a scout videographer as well.

This was the first visit of the new astronomy club based at the high school.

I stayed out of the way and manned a telescope outside as well as talked with a bunch of visitors and a few of the high school club members.

We had a half a dozen Faac members show up and bring their telescopes.

Sandra, Tim C, Brian K, and Rick A, had their telescopes out. (I'm not including their last names because this is a quick post and I'm too touch in a hurry to look up all the spellings.

Sandra had a 14.5 inch Dobsonian telescope out. Art Parent and Tim Dey were there as well. Professor David Cinabro presented a Meade deep sky imager to Mr. Rockwell the Lincoln Park superintendent.

Much of the presentations were captured on video tape. There was a little creative staging of scouts looking through the telescope, but unfortunately this was just for the show and didn't really occur due to clouds.


It was still fun to show off the observatory and the equipment. Sandra gave a talk on how her telescope worked and had it aimed at a local radio tower in the area. I aimed my binoculars at the tower as well. The moon peeked out very little through the clouds later in the evening but it was still covered with many layers of clouds and was barely visible. A few people got a short glimpse of the moon.

Tuesday skies were clear and some Faac members did a telescope and astronomy outreach at the Wayne public library.

Wednesday I went out late and looked through the telescope at HJRO but I didn't announce it as being open because I wanted to do a test and was suffering a bit from allergies or a cold, or some kind of bug perhaps. My throat was bugging me. I toughhed it out and Brian Kutcher ended up coming out as he emailed me and we worked on imaging with the Meade. We had some problems with the mount not tracking well. Brian took some shots with his Canon Eos as well and we did a little bit of visual observing very late into the morning hours. We left at about 3am. The Orion Nebula at 3am with the 8mm eyepiece and oxygen3 filter looked really awesome. Although the stars were not sharp at that high power the nebula looked like a thickly spun cobweb, the type you might see in the woods.

We were at awe at the view of m42 in the 15mm with the u2 filter as well.

Here's a photo from Monday night.




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