20130908b-46The first Kingston Astronomy Outreach Network (KAON) open house/public observing session/astronomy lecture of the “new season ” was held on Saturday September 14th, 2013 at the Ellis Hall Observatory on Queen’s
campus.

Jonathan Sick (an astronomy grad student at Queen’s University) gave a talk from 8:05 until about 9:00 on
“A Journey Through the Andromeda Galaxy ” to a crowd of about 90 people.
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Following that, tours of the observatory and the Celestron C14 and observing with 3 telescopes out on the observing deck.

Laurie and son Devon brought their 20cm Schmidt-Cass scope, Kim manned the 20cm Fitzgerald and Susan brought her 10cm scope to observe, variously, the moon (with and without filters), Alberio, M31
and other objects. The moon was 9? days old and was causing a lot of lit up haze in the area.

We also put out free books and magazines from our outreach collection along with starfinders, mooncharts, sidewalk astronomer booklets, Collector cards and more. Most were gone by the end of the evening!

Nathalie manned the C14, which was unfortunately not
functioning that night. We had a new undergrad volunteer by the name of Nathan who helped out as well.

All in all a good evening with no bugs, a good stiff wind that shook the telescopes and a lot of happy people.