Thoughts from Starlight Cascade

Looks like the upgrade to Linux Fedora 11 broke something…
the image magick conversion process of *.jpg into today.mpeg has been failing since the upgrade. Will have to track that down as the .mpeg was much smaller than the animated .gif file that the batch routines create.

Friday June 5th, 2009 was our 4th appearance at the Cancer Society Relay for Life event, this year at the Royal Military College Parade Ground.

Kim & I arrived on scene at 6pm, found our location and started to set up in a minimal footprint. One table, our decorative astro table cloths and 50 packs of handouts in ziplock bags.
In the past few events, Susan’s idea of packaging handouts has worked out much better than many loose sheets of paper, blowing in the breeze, getting wet, dirty, etc.
These included the latest issue of Skynews, our own RASC-KC
brochures, a starfinder, some meteor notes and brochures, our
business card and a star chart and a What’s Up in the Sky with map handout.

We set up the 25cm Douglas scope with the 32mm University Optics eyepiece (x44) and viewed the sun for a short time with a full aperture Baader film filter until it dropped in behind the buildings.

That was followed by an almost full moon from around 7:45 pm onwards. Saturn popped out of the bright sky and from behind the tree around 9:30 pm and we spent the rest of the evening showing over 402 people Saturn at x88 with a x2 barlow with the 32mm eyepiece. The centre banner was up along with the IYA banner.

So much for the technical stuff. This was an evening of emotion. Group after group of cancer survivors and supporters stopped by to observe something new, something also from the world around them. Some stopped by to talk about their ordeals with cancer, and the need to share their experiences, gives you more of an understanding of what they faced, and conquered. The number of small children with cancer survivor ribbons on them looking at the Moon and Saturn was something else, it was a Galileo Moment that meant a little more to them. We had people step out of the initial survivors lap to thank us for coming out and giving them a chance to take a break or just come over to talk.

Kim was handing out astrocards left right and center over the course of our 6 hours there. A couple of members stopped in to chat and take some astro images of the moon. They had a good time, and we certainly did as well. We finally packed up after midnight and got home just before 1am.

The sky was hazy and transparency was not the greatest, but that did not dampen our memories of this night. They will be with us for along time, and the strength of the survivors gives us the strength to do this again next year.

As if you have not been inundated enough with Earth Hour 2009 news, here is another attempt to encourage you to participate.

Saturday March 28th from 20:30-21:30 EDT is Earth Hour.
An attempt at bringing attention to various things, global climate change,
outrageous resource usage, waste, placating astronomers and more. From its
humble roots in 2007. I am amazed at the growth and reach of this initiative.
Its real affects are small, but getting the concepts of conservation, pollution
and waste into the attention span of the average citizen is a start.

So, Along with the City of Kingston
http://www.cityofkingston.ca/residents/environment/earth-hour.asp
and
Queen’s University
http://qnc.queensu.ca/campusnews_article_loader.php?id=47ea7028736aa

we encourage you to join in.

Here at work we will be shutting down non-essential systems, computers, air
handling units for the weekend starting Friday afternoon.

At home we plan on running this event for most of the day, powering down
non-essential electrical devices, turning off non-essential computer systems,
keeping all of the lights off from morning until evening, and if clear, be
outside enjoying the night skies during the actual event itself.

We also plan on taking Sky Quality Meter readings before during and after.
The only downside are the idiot politicians who moved daylight savings to early
March, blindly assuming it is a good thing, when modern studies show that it is
not… I would go as far to say as detrimental to energy use and conservation.

So the skies will not be totally dark as they would have been otherwise in
Eastern Standard Time.

Clear Skies… Keep observing!

2009 Observing Last Night Overall I found that the 5/4″ eyepieces on the 90mm Meade were a lot easier to hold the camera up to the eyepiece and snap off images (than the 2″ eyepieces). I was using a 25mm plossl (about x36 I think), 1/1000sec exposures and the camera on continuous motor drive as it were… Starting with wide angle and then zooming in to x4 on the camera optics and changing the exposure
up to 1/125 sec we had 100 images before you could shake a stick… good
thing too.. clouds came in and it was cold and Rick Mercer was about to
come on.

Then the cool thing happened… reviewing the images inside and
noticed a neat feature lit up on the moon… in the shape of an X

Cool! It looks like the Lunar X feature that was imaged without even
hunting for it! (see RASC Journal April 2007). Attached are two small
images.. one wide angle and the other heavily cropped…
Here they are:

This is our new Meade DS90 refractor on display at the last months Public Observing Session.

The finder battery died pretty quick so we are waiting to replace that before trying out some more testing.