(Viewed 1,417 times)

[Chicago Astronomer - Astro Joe]

Chicago Astronomer Star Party

Friday, the 13th of September 2013 - 7pm

The Chicago Astronomers will set-up telescopes this Friday, the 13th of September at 7pm at our usual location, just west of the Adler Planetarium building.

We will catch the last of Saturn, a bright Venus and some good lunar viewings with our fans and friends.

The museum campus area will be in flux with games at Soldier Field this weekend and it seems that Friday will be our only time for some public scope time. The weather will be cool and the skies fair with a high pressure system over us.

Be there.

[Chicago Astronomer - Astro Joe]

UPDATE:

Although the clouds are pretty thick now, the mass looks like it will slide away from us and we should have some decent skies by 7pm. The Sun is already peeking out from behind the clouds.

Gonna be a great lunar night.

Stay tuned kids....

[Chicago Astronomer - Astro Joe]

A Breezy chilly fun session....

It's been awhile since our last Chicago Astronomer public session and nudges to get back out were in my pms and mail box. Friday was the only available evening for a session, since silly games were going to close down the area for the weekend.

The winds were a bit brisk for this session, with lake generated weather was coming straight down the coast. But C.A.'s have been in worse and we set-up...

Joining in this session are regular Chicago Astronomers Steve, John & Bill, with Maria in crew support. The Moon will be our highlight of this session, with quick glimpses of Venus and even quicker views of Saturn.

Stopping by was Adler Astronomer Jose Salgado...



Steve got a new high shelf pair of Denkmeier Binoviwers and wanted to try them out on their first use tonight...

Steve was having a bit of trouble with the inward focusing. These Binoviewers have a slide in barlow, which is cool and it helped to bring the lunar surface in focus. Adding on another barlow at the nose end brought good focusing, but he needs to shorten the visual back of his Vixen RC to achieve proper focus travel. He's working on it.

We compared my low shelf Orion Binoviewers on my C102 with his Denkmeier, and they are both comparable in my opinion, but we did not conduct an appropriate shoot-out test. That will have to be done in a future session.

The skies cleared up nicely by nightfall, but the winds were still a bit strong. Even so, we start our session and have visitors ready to enjoy some lunar views...

John had his 5" SCT Nexstar up and ready for our session...

Some scopes were on venus, some on Saturn and I stayed on the Moon - with the C11 handling the winds well, but still some shake - even with the large mass...

Bill had his 4" Refractor on Saturn and had a visitor who believed that he had a sticker on the objective lens!

We were quite busy on this Friday the 13th..

A new participant to the Chicago Astronomer crew, John - he sent me an email last week and wanted to see if we could assist him with his ETX 125. We worked to help him set-up his nice deep blue scope for the basics - and it did provide nice views of the Moon for this initial shake out...

Another newcomer to the Chicago Astronomer crew is Javier. We met one recent session, where I set-up solo to catch the Blue Moon and he mentioned that he had a fork mounted 8" Meade SCT . He arrived with the scope and set-up along with us...

Picked up at a pawn shop, it performs beautifully and he even attached his DSLR for some impressive on-the-spot shots of M57....

And we continue well past of when we thought we would pack up - meeting old Chicago Astronomer friends and making new fans...

I wonder what caught my ire here:

I'll go all medieval....

We broke down out site at about 10:00 pm and attended to 30 visitors. Big shout out to Chicago Astronomer crew: Steve, Bill, John and Maria - and new members John and Javier....on that windy night of Astronomers and scopes.