I'm going to post a few more photos about Last Saturday's viewig

This is a summary of last weekend including Friday's viewing.

We saw a huge solar flare blasting off the son Friday. It was late in the day when I first opened up HJRO and met Tim Dey. Tim and I were on the phone a lot and chatted with Greg Ozimek (another FAAC member) over SKYPE and Facetime. Some other members arrived and looked at the huge solar flare blasting off the sun through our Lunt solar telescope in the observatory.

We had other visitors at night. Then we opened up the next day (Saturday), to view solar flares, and also opened up in the evening and had many visitors. I have some photos of those which I may post in another post. I like to take late night photos as long exposure photos from a bit of a distance allowing some of the night time sky to be in the photo and the stars to be in focus. The long exposure will make the subjects appear bright and fairly visible, and the stars will pop out in the background. Sky glow at HJRO from other lights will hinder the effect of seeing the stars in these photos. Glow from the observatory often gives an interesting late night glowing effect. It's nice if the shutter is open and the red lights are on inside, giving the observatory a reddish glow.

The visitors were about a dozen members of the HFCC astronomy club on Saturday night as well as perhaps three sets of visitors who came in from the late night parking lot rush to pick up returning kids from a Cedar Point field trip. About 40 cars came into the lot after midnight and turned off their lights. I went out and asked one of them what was happening and the parent inside the car said, everyone was there to pick up kids from two busses returning from Cedar Point. Brian volunteered to invite each family to get a quick late night tour of the observatory. I'd say only three families stopped by. Some of them didn't bring kids, just parents. It seemed to me that it was three parents from different cars and some kids stopped in. They were able to look at Saturn and the Ring Nebula. We also saw many other objects. Those who stayed late, saw Pluto on the Stellacam, and also some other objects that are to faint for visual viewing in our bright sky location. We also saw Mars, Venus, Neptune, the blinking Nebula, the double cluster and the "double double" a double star which has two double stars in it, showing four stars in a double star system. We also saw the ghost of Saturn nebula, M13, and likely there were other objects some saw when I wasn't inside which I may have missed.

We looked at a lot of objects. Some stayed longer than others, and I was there for 8 hours until 5:30am. Yes it was an all night observing session and I went to be Sunday at 6am and woke up around 12:30 in the afternoon.

Then Sunday I opened up HJRO again shortly for about 45 minutes. Only one other FAAC member could make it out for viewing apparently, Brian Kutscher. Dan Barriball arrived shortly before we left to Allen Park. We took a little three car convoy to Allen Park to a location on a hill where there is a large mall complex. There is a pumping station across from the Meijers and a small parking lot with a hill that overlooks a large pond. We had a fairly clear view overlooking houses in the distance towards the west from that location. I forgot my Canon camera, locked it in the observatory and decided I had time to drive back and get it before the eclipse would begin. But I also live close to the observatory and decided I could get my large 10 inch telescope and observe the sun with that and a white light solar filter. I had a choice to make, get the camera or the telescope. There were other telescopes there of course, but also other cameras that the other FAAC members had.

I decided to get the telescope and leave the Canon EOS locked up in the observatory. Was able to return and with a little help setup the telescope and mount. That 10 inch telescope is pretty heavy when setup with it's portable mount (200lbs).

I don't have lens covers for the small refractor on my telescope and keep forgetting to create one. A spare sock was used to block that, so any visitors would not see any image if they happened to come up and try to look through the refractor. I don't have a cover for the finter either so i used some tape to attach a folded envelope and cover the finder. The solar film holder was taped over the opening of the telescope. It's important to firmly tape or attach a solar cover with screws or some heavy duty mounting system when viewing the sun. You don't want the wind to blow off the solar filter in front of the telescope while viewing the sun. Instant blindness could result. If the filter doesn't screw onto the telescope or use screws to securely attach the filter, you may need to use some pieces of tape to attach the filter firmly.

We saw the moon start to cover the sun and start to move and cover more and more of the sun. The eclipse would not be visible during the entire event as the sun was low and setting as it started to happen. It would be something we could view for perhaps 30 minutes, but clouds cut the effective viewing time down to something more like 15 minutes. We had many visitors who just saw us and dropped by to take a look. I didn't take any photos of the visitors, but only photos of the four of us who set out from the observatory site. This included myself and Mr. French who made his first visit at HJRO the night before and also stayed at the observatory all night. Mr. French and I saw the ISS around 5:10am Sunday morning at the end of the early observing session. I took some photos of the ISS flyby. I'll try to post that up on the blog, but it's just a small dot in the image as I took it with my Canon EOS and not through any powerful telescope. It's more of an event documentation photo than a zoomed photograph of an object.

Now back to the visitors during and after the solar eclipse. We had perhaps four visitors look through our telescopes at the sun and eclipse when it happened. Others arrived afterwards and looked at Venus and Saturn. I didn't show them Mars because the view wasn't very impressive and we were breaking down and trying to get out of there before a bunch of visitors kept us out there later. Breaking down Big Bertha took maybe 10 to 15 minutes. A few of us chatted for a while after Brian had left. At about 10:30PM Dan and I drove over to Taco Bell and grabbed a small snack. Dan and I visited for perhaps another 50 minutes and finally left. The sky looked clear and I put out a post late in the evening as I picked up my Canon EOS from the observatory. The sky was clear at 1:15am last night, but I was too tired to open up the observatory and observe.

I've left out a lot of details of course. So many conversations, and many of them between others. Some visitors enjoy and discuss astronomy applications on the iPad and at times I show these to visitors. The nights have been very comfortable as well and they are the nice cool, but not to cold, spring nights without many bugs that an observer dreams of having. Basically perfect observing nights. I heard someone say we are supposed to get rain today. Much of the day has been clear, but I haven't gone to do solar observing because I have other things to do during the day.