A symbiotic southern exposure, new gigs, and some sidewalk astronomy

I've spent a little time lately exploring nearby sites that would give me the good southern exposure I lack at Driftway Observatory. Yesterday I found one that's near perfect, ended up doing a little sidewalk astronomy in the process, and signed up for some new gigs.

The first of the new gigs is Horseneck Beach camp ground. That's a good ocean-side site with a built-in audience, so I talked to the guy in charge of programs. He was enthusiastic, so we agreed on a program a week through the summer – well, actually two programs each night. One will go from 8:30-to-9:15 and focus on the planets and/or moon. The second from 9:15 –to-10 – when their "quiet time" begins – and focus on stars. They'll be given on Thursday nights with people signing up in advance. The campground is in charge of promoting the program and getting up to 10 people to sign up for it. I'll do a cloudy-night alternative in anything other than rainy weather. (They have no appropriate indoor facility.) As with my other programs, I don’t want a large group. I want to work with small groups of people and offer them an opportunity to get some extended eyepiece time. Also, I included the rule of one adult, one child which has worked well at Driftway.

The sort of mini-program I plan for the campground is exactly what I ended up doing last night on the fly at the new site. If nothng else , it drove home the obvious point that folks who go to campgrounds or wildlife sanctuaries are a natural audience for astronomy programs. The beach has nice, 360-degree horizons, but even if they let me into the campground any time I wanted to observe, it would be awkward with the campers around and that 10 pm curfew is a killer – heck it's hardly, really dark until then in the summer. So i didn't even ask. I also think getting into there at night in the off season would be problematic. Still, it may hold a possibility for a larger group event some time.

But there's a better choice for what I want to do – the new Allens Pond Audubon Wild Life Sanctuary parking lot. It's an 11-minutes drive from my house and they just built a modest-sized, shell-covered, parking lot that is protected from car headlights (somewhat) on the nearby road by a large berm. It offers 180 degree horizons, maybe diminished by at most 5 degrees to the west. The sanctuary officially closes at dusk, but Gina Purtell, the director, generously gave me permission to use the parking-lot area from dusk to dawn on a drop-in basis. ( A letter from her is on the way that I can use in case police show up, checking the parking lot, and wondering what I'm doing.)

In return for access, we're going to work out some programs with the sanctuary that are similar to what I do at Driftway. Once more, small groups (10 or fewer) with multiple opportunities to observe built around specific learning goals. (May even have an appropriate indoor facility for cloudy nights, though that's still to be seen.) This to me seems to fit nicely into the nature programs of the sanctuary and it's this symbiosis that makes using the site for observation such a natural.

I didn’t have anyone scheduled to come out to Driftway last night, I decided to try a dry run at the Sancturary. I packed up just the 5-inch Celestron NexStar with battery and headed out, stop watch running. It was 20 minutes from my driveway to the point that I had a "solar system align" completed with the little Celestron set-up and humming in the parking lot – and two minutes later when a voice from a guy standing behind me startled the heck out of me! It had not occurred to me there might still be people in the sanctuary, since the parking lot was empty. This was a big guy, who had just emerged from the path. (With my poor hearing I don’t even hear people walking on the shells that form the parking lot bed.) Turns out there were several others behind him,

What that lead to was much more of a dry run then I had counted on. I ended up with a party of six men and women of various ages, all enthusiastic to look through the scope. So I took them on a tour from Venus, to Saturn, to Jupiter, the Moon, and finally Albireo. Saturn is way low in the west these nights, but still wows people – even in the 5-inch at low power. But I think the real crowd pleaser was the 11-day moon, about 22-degrees up in the south. (It would have been hidden from my house, as is Jupiter which is even lower in the south this year.)

My impromtu group asked some good questions, my favorite being one about why the moons of Jupiter all seemed to be in a straight line near the planet's mid-section. That opened a great opportunity to explain about how the solar system was formed and how the planets are all in a plane – and, of course, they could see this nicely by looking at the line Venus, Saturn, the Moon and Jupiter made across the sky from northwest to South east.

The moon light drowned out most of the stars and the transparency was poor with lots of water vapor in the air, so I could barely make out third-magnitude Albireo. Adding to the complexities, the "solar system align" I had done was far from perfect, probably because I told the computer it was June 26 when it was really June 25th. (Computers hate that kind of thing – picky, picky!) This meant any "go to" I did left me well shy of the intended target, but the red dot finder was fine for giving quick alignments with the planets. Using it on a barely discernible Albireo was a bit more dicey, but it worked fine, so they got to see a sweet double.

The sidewalk astronomy went fine, but I kept thinking of the legendary John Dobson standing on the streets of San Francisco trying to lure folks to his scope. This, of course, was much easier because those wandering by me were already in tune with the natural world or they would not have been there, stumbling around in that fire-fly studded field and swatting mosquitoes. The group learned how to find the north star, saw the phases of Venus, the rings of Saturn, the moons of Jupiter, and mountain peaks on our own moon, caught in dazzling sunlight and sticking out in the dark just west of the terminator.

We even got a surprise appearance from what looked like an Iridium satellite, flaring to about magnitude zero. However, checking the schedule this morning, I see one wasn't due for another half hour so this must have been something else catching the rays of the Sun for a few moments.

This was a good test of this observing site and it passed with flying colors. Of course, for programs I plan to bring two or three scopes – maybe more depending on what's on the agenda. I figure a reasonable time frame will be to leave my house 45 minutes to an hour before a program starts. My first targets for this site will be the observing task for July for the Prime Time group – including Jupiter, Antares, Scorpius and the "teapot." But I plan to use it more frequently. For example, with it's clear eastern horizon, it will be great for observing the full moon later this week and doing the test I proposed in this blog on the moon illusion