Observing for the blind? We have a lot to learn!

Remember the observing for the blind project? It happened last night. Or rather, it didn’t happen. We were there. Roughly 1,000 people were there. The clouds were there, but we got decent looks at Venus, the Moon, Saturn, and an incredible Iridum flare despite them. However, if there was a blind person present I never saw or heard about them. And frankly, had they been there, I can't imagine them finding us in the dark in a crowd like this except by sheer luck.

Bottom line – IMHO I and the other planners of this event were naïve in expecting blind people to be able to take advantage of it. The problem is not a matter of seeing through the telescopes, but of finding the telescopes meant for them. There were roughly two dozen telescopes set up on a large, grassy hillside area in front of the Town Hall in Barrington, Ri. Good location. But there is totally unrestricted access to it. People can enter the field at any point on its perimeter. While there was a rationale for the way the scopes were set up and great organization of the event from the perspective of sighted individuals who can comfortably mill about in a crowd in the dark and join a telescope line, I simply can't imagine a blind person doing that – even with help – and finding the two telescopes we had dedicated to their use.

The scopes, btw, didn’t go idle. I had a constant stream of people looking at the 5-day moon on the live video display and appropriately fascinated by it. Later I found Saturn through the clouds and although it was invisible to the naked eye, the telescope view thrilled many visitors. Steve Wimberg, who was helping with Project Bright Star, had plenty of visitors to his 8-inch DOB, and Peter Sawyer did a nice job circulating in the crowd and answering questions. But if anyone encountered a blind person, I never heard about it.

I think the California event we were inspired by is something much different. Though I can't be sure of all the details, here's how I think it differs:

1. It is dedicated to just blind observers.
2. It is done in conjunction with an organization for the blind that guarantees a crowd and I suspect helps with the event in some ways.
3. It is a day/night event where everyone goes to a national park, has a cookout, and presumably gets to know the layout of telescopes in the light, before nightfall.

.Here's how Frank Busutil, the originator of this idea, describes their event:

We chose Joshua Tree National Park, a Desert location at an elevation of 3,000 feet 30 miles from the nearest city. Our attendees get a great outdoor adventure, a beautiful sunset barbecue and a night of observing many astronomical targets at the telescopes and on our monitors.

That's far different than devoting two telescopes to the blind and although there was some space between us and the other scopes, the crowd milled about as the spirit moved them and totally erased any sense of boundaries that might have existed.

Had we tried to enforce the boundaries we would have spent all night simply shooing people away from our scopes which didn't seem in the spirit of the event.

I also think we need to be prepared for blind people to take much longer at the scope than a sighted individual. Looking at the pictures Frank provided two things stood out. In one a "student" is helping a blind person down a path. (I wonder if they had extra people on hand just for this sort of thing?) In another I notice two people are helping a blind person at a telescope.

People saw our telescopes and were curious. I had so many people asking question – not about observing for the blind, but about the telescope and video, that is was difficult to get set up. I don’t begrudge their enthusiasm – that's why I was there. But I certainly wasn't going to tell people to get lost – that this is an event for the blind and they should go elsewhere. Especially when elsewhere every scope I looked at had plenty of people walking around it and/or standing in line to take a peek.

So what did I get out of this? Well there was a lot of enthusiasm. For 1,000 people to show up – and that estimate seems very reasonable to me – on a night when clouds were obviously obscuring a good deal of the sky was pretty incredible. They were an extremely well-behaved, family-oriented crowd and had lots of good questions. The Iridium flare was incredible. Advertised in advance as a magnitude –8 event, I suspect it was, because it too was shining through clouds, but brighter than any thing I've seen except a full moon or the Sun. It brought sounds of awe from throughout the gathering.

And I was once again surprised at what you can do through a pretty solid covering of stratus clouds. As I say, except for the few minutes during which I found Saturn manually, it was invisible to the naked eye. Yet one person after another was able to get an acceptable view through the scope at about 150X! (I was using the Celestron 8-24mm zoom on the LX90, but also had the F6.3 focal reducer in place. I didn't try to put Staurn on video under these circumstances. I felt lucky to have found it at all.)

I had started the scope on an automatic alignment, but could not see any alignment stars, so I had just found the moon and Saturn manually and the LX90 did a very credible job of tracking. I had to re-center stuff every five minutes or so, but really, it was quite good.

It was also good to meet several club members, including Ed Roach whose fine astro pictures of planets I've used in this blog several times.

That said, I still prefer doing the more in-depth study with a few people at my home observatory. I'm glad other club members like doing this sort of thing because it certainly is an excellent public service activity. But I have trouble enough keeping my equipment organized at home where things are assigned their place. I made 12 trips this morning to empty my car, taking stuff to the observing deck, observatory, "club house," and storage area. Now I need to rematch scopes to specific mounts, and get lots of wire sand small parts back to where they belong. Others may find that fun, but I have such a running battle with trying to stay half-way organized, that I could go for years without packing stuff up and trekking it off to some event such as this again. Maybe I'm getting old and cranky, but with a dozen scopes and mounts and eyepieces and other accessories for each, keeping things usefully organized at Driftway Observatory is one of my least enjoyable tasks.