Cleanup at HJRO, and why we have shelving units.

Some cleanup happened during the last install at HJRO.

I've been hearing about plans to remove the large shelve unit in HJRO and make things more "streamlined" and professional inside.

From time to time people bring in and loan or donate items at HJRO. Sometimes these items are used, sometimes they are set aside and we use them on an as needed basis.  This stuff can collect inside the small observatory and during the day, we can see the mess more.  It's not as streamlined as it might be for a public observing place.

But there is another story to this as well.  At night, most don't really look at the shelves at the observatory.  They are looking at the telescope and objects.  This is not meant to be an excuse to keeping a sloppy ship at the site, but most don't notice how cluttered or uncluttered the shelves are at night because the lights are off and it's dark.

It' a challenge to figure out what we should have inside or not have stored inside.

Ideally we'd have three astronomers or more show up with equipment and they will put their stuff they bring on an empty spot on the shelves and have their stuff over there off the floor.  We might even have other features.  One of the members mentioned hooks for coats to be hung on some time back.

It seems that the observatory at times is used by a few regulars and we bring a few items in.  Sometimes they end up on the floor.  Why?  We keep more stuff, and things on the shelves, because we have more space.  We tend to "fill up the space we have" and not clean house much.

There are seasonal things as well that end up inside, that may not be used much.  Things like a large broom handle that is used to brush off snow off the dome.  A couple of heaters inside which are handy when it's cold out.  People love those heaters in the winter, but in the summer they are just in the way.  Take them out to storage.  And we can have enough folding chairs, or have the need for more depending on the situation.   With a bunch of old FAAC guys visiting who have been there for hours, all the chairs will be taken and they may bring in more chairs.  We may have five or six chairs inside with people sitting in them.  And not much floor space, but hardly any visitors.

Sometimes things are donated to the observatory and they are used a lot.  Other times they are hardly used at all.  Maybe someone has an extra something that they don't need, and they figure the observatory can use it.  So they may donate it to the observatory.  We obviously don't have enough space to become some kind of Smithsonian dumping grounds. 

Some things are "cool" as well.  For example we have a couple of large monitors, which are great for computer use.  The monitors being donated, or loaned to the observatory are getting larger and larger.  This is a great thing of course for old guys with bad reading eyesight.  We can see a bigger screen and bigger fonts can be on the screen easy to read.

This however is something that has diminishing returns.  Not that the donations are not appreciated.  The problem is when a large monitor is on inside, it throws off a lot of light.  We are trying to keep our eyes dark adapted when looking at faint objects.  A 24 inch computer monitor throws off a lot of light.  It's possible that we'll turn it off a lot when viewing and we might even find ourselves using the Losmandy controller more and the computer less, when we are looking for faint fuzzy stuff in the sky like galaxies, and are trying to keep our eyes dark adapted.

One thing I found out that is really annoying when observing away from the inside of a dark observatory, is stray lights from street lights are a real pain.  There is a nice feature we have, as far as getting the eyes dark adapted, in an observatory we can shut the door, turn off as many glowing things as possible and get our eyes dark adapted. 

We can't control sky glow from many sources, but we can control glare from inside the observatory, that happens with an off switch.

There are other thing that need to be done of course.  We need to organize the stuff and put some of the loose stuff in little file boxes so it can be moved and organized and found much easier.  We have some paperwork and things we rarely use.

Right now we have a shelving unit inside that is quite large and can handle industrial capacity loads.  It's fairly large, but it won't tip over if anyone leans on it.

We can do one of many things depending on what we have stored at the site or bring to the site.  We can display the original mirror, give out  old magazines we have stored there, to give away.  We can do live video feed to a monitor.  We can do spectroscopy, with a special filter.

In addition to these things we can do some other things, but these are more rare.  We can sit at the eyepiece and draw what we see instead of taking a photo. We can do that because we have an observing chair stored inside.   We can setup a laptop high up near the eyepiece by using the observing chair as a laptop stand. 

We can stay a couple hours longer because we have an IR heater to take some of the chill off the night at the end of a winter observing session.  We may blast ourselves with two heaters, if we are really cold at the end of an observing session while we are putting things away.  We can put on a focal reducer to see a wider field of view on the C14.

And of course there are things we can do depending on equipment we bring.  We can take low light photos of visitors inside the observatory.  These show them and the equipment or the background of the sky with the stars in focus outside.

We can mount other cameras, DSLR cameras on the telescope and let others take photos.

There's some things we can't do easily.  We will be able to stream video from HJRO eventually.  We may be able to in theory shoot a short video segment inside, but the sound quality for a cable TV recording would be very bad.  

There are a few things that we could do better.   We might have more handouts that share more information.   Better handouts for visitors.  Often however we have visitors who have email and it's easier to just get their email address and send them a link or a PDF document.  This saves on printed paper expense. 

Storage of non-essentials, or utility stuff that is rarely used.
We have two or three folding chairs we store at HJRO.  Sometimes we could stand to have a few more, but many times FAAC astronomers will bring their own chairs, so it's not a great need.

We have other things, like a big piece of insulating foam, that is a kind of roll that I've left there.  This serves as a quick thing to put out on the lawn for a visiting astronomer, giving the person standing out side an insulated floor on the grass outside.  In the winter a part of survival skills is having a insulated piece of foam or something to sleep on to keep off the cold ground.  This foam acts as a temporary ground cover for outside.  We also had a group of visiting students from HFCC use it as a kind of ground cover to lay on while looking up at a meteor shower.  This foam takes up a little bit of space.

We used to have a few things that have some historical value, but no practical value.  These were the old telescope tubes.  We have the old telescope mirrors as well.  Sometimes older visitors who were in the school system and remember the old telescopes are amazed to see that we still have parts of the old setup here as a display piece.  The old tubes however served as no practical item.  The large 12.5 inch telescope tube, actually closer to 15 inches in diameter that stood 9 feet high was a kind of smoke stack looking object sitting on the floor.  We got rid of that.  I took the old blue tube home for a year, and thought about refurbishing it.  But the cost would be high and the old tube would be a heavy thing to setup or cart out.  Not very practical anymore with much lighter telescope designs out there now.  So we removed that blue tube and rather than scrap it, had a new member take it home so he could remove a part of it for his own telescope.  That old blue tube would not become a practical instrument again.  I visited Perkins observatory in Ohio which is a much larger place of course.  They have school rooms and rooms for displays of all kinds.  They have a large room library that has a large collection of telescopes in it.  These are donated to Perkins or on loan to them.  One thing they stipulate for a donation or loaned item is "it has to work" because they won't put a telescope on display that they can't take out and use at a public viewing event.  At Perkins they have twenty telescopes of varying designs ready to use.  That's a good plan and way to look at stuff inside the observatory as a form of value.  Will we use it and is it practical.  If we aren't using the item, it's just taking up space, and we don't really have a lot of that extra space inside.

Now this doesn't mean we should go back to having bare walls and a scope in the middle.  Most of the time, at least up to now, we have three people inside the observatory, and rarely four or five.  We don't usually have ten or twenty visitors pop in and try to cram themselves inside for standing room only.  As we are now run by astronomers who are often there with other telescopes, if we have a larger turnout we can setup more telescopes outside quickly and take the pressure of having everyone inside the observatory off.

I'd like to have a few things inside to make the observatory more professional. One thing that always impressed me was a Questar on display in a case at one of the observatories I visited in the past.  We'd ask what was that and it was a Questar just sitting there on the shelf.  They wouldn't take it out and show it to the public, it was just there.   Providing ambiance.

If anyone has a Questar laying around that you don't want and you would like to donate it to HJRO, we'd be more than willing to take it off your hands. . . :)  It would look nice up there on the shelf.  Shoot I might even remove some of the other small cheaper telescopes that I leave there from time to time.  We'd also take any Takahashi or Televue telescope donations that would fit on the shelves as well.  As long as they fit on the shelve and we can use them, we'd have no problem with that kind of donation. 

I was at the swap meet and had my eye on a nice expensive telescope called a Portaball telescope that had a 12.5 inch mirror.  I had visions of using that and setting it up outside HJRO for a little extra viewing at times and to allow visitors to look through it.  I asked George Korody who was at the swap meet, George help me by encouraging me to "NOT BUY" that telescope.  I really was tempted because it was a really nice and unique telescope with great optics.   I asked George if he thought I might set that inside the observatory and have it there if I bought it, to see what his response would be.  He said, we're better off not having any other telescope sitting inside there.  That was a good reason to not purchase that Mag-1 Portaball.  That response was one of the things, beside my limited budget that stopped me from buying the telescope right there.  Another thing of course is there is no real need to have a large telescope inside that we wheel outside of HJRO.  We don't need a large roll out telescope to "compete" in a sense with the C14 inside.  It's not about if we can one up the C14 with another telescope.  That's not the goal, although I like having visiting FAAC members bring big scopes and show them off and look through them.  It's just not a practical thing. 

But I feel we can be practical by having telescopes that "augment" the large scope inside.  If we have different small telescopes that we can quickly take outside and setup, then we have the ability to show people different objects at the same time and host more people offering more eyepiece time.  This was really important in the old days with students who could only be at the observatory for a short time.  It's not as important for FAAC members who are older and may not have a curfew. Sometimes we will stop by the observatory, look at a few objects and talk about stuff for hours.  We don't even look at many objects, we end up sitting and chatting, more of a social thing.  But for groups of people it's nice to have more small telescopes to get rid of some of the line or observing pressure.

There are of course many other options today with astronomy and the internet has opened up a world of learning and display possibilities.  The ipad and smartphones allows us to have a planetarium in our hand and show off a lot of stuff without a telescope.  I can talk to people about astronomy anywhere and have instant information and tons of Astronomy apps on the iPad.  It's really a different world now from those old days, with mirror kits and building your own telescope.

OTHER IDEAS
It would be nice if we could have a box, like a playground recreation department box permanently affixed to the ground outside near the observatory.  This could act as a place to store items that could be stored outside, like folding chairs, snow removal equipment, perhaps even vacuum cleaners, etc.  This would allow us to store fewer items in the observatory, yet have access to these in a "box outside."  Unfortunately we may not have that as an option because there is a limit to what can be built at the observatory.

I used to think the ideal warming room and presentation room would be one next to the observatory that might even act as a second observatory and small telescope museum.  Something that could seat 20 people and had four to six working telescopes on display that we could use if we had a larger event.

With time and use of the observatory your perceptions change on what is ideal.  Tim Dey one of our main leaders at the site, has a lot of visions of digital outreach and streaming.  That's certainly a possibility and high tech.  From what I've seen from field trips from classes going out to the observatory, the ideal "control and presentation room" would be somewhat different than I envisioned when I first came into the club and saw the observatory.  The more ideal setup would be to have an AV room that can host an entire classroom of 30 kids and has space for a teacher and presenter. Maybe room for a control room.  Perhaps still room for a display of telescopes. Perhaps an AV projector or setup for astronomy presentations.  I used to even think it could be a temporary re-configurable "maker fairre" kind of lab, for telescope building projects.   In any event, that's just a dream of a possible "better setup" for HJRO that I have.  But it's likely impossible due to building site restrictions.  A larger lot for parking when the new middle school was built meant that future expansion in our area would be limited.  They have to have a certain amount of green space or lawns for drainage of water.  We are literally parked on a drainage runoff field.  

Well that's enough discussion for now.

The HJRO site seems to be pretty flexible and useable and reconfigured depending on the astronomy needs we have at the time.  I almost bought a few small clear containers to go over and organize some of the stuff that is still in there today, but I had to many things happening today to go over there and do a little more organizing.