Post by erikruud on Jun 6, 2012 7:11:19 GMT -6
I want to start out by saying how happy I was to see that Joe got some time to see the transit in spite of everything.
Next I want to thank Rich for organizing the event with the Saint Charles Park District.
The weather and the turn out were amazing! It could have been a little less windy, but I am not going to complain.
There were no clouds to worry about at all.
I got to our chosen site by 3:00 PM and started setting up the canopy. The original plan had been to set up the canopy with a shade panel on the west side so that we could have a shaded spot for some laptops, but the wind was trying to turn the panel into a sail so we gave up on that part of the plan.
Before I had finished with the canopy Rich arrived with his gear. Before long we had 4 filtered scopes and a sun funnel pointing at the sun.
At one point Rich and I looked up and saw this guy walking across the parking lot with the OTA for a NextStar C11. His name was Andy and he had driven down from Toronto! He wanted to make sure that he was somewhere with good weather for the event. Rich drove him back to his car which was on the far side of the soccer fields and showed him where the back road to our site was. Now we had six scopes.
Our site had soccer fields on both sides of us, so before long we were getting visitors and showing them the sun and explaining about the transit and sun spots.
I met so many people and I don't remember all of them now. Sorry
Another guy showed up. He was a teacher and theoretical physicist from the south side. He had another NextStar. I think it was an 6 inch. It had been given to him by a former student to use for astronomy classes at the high school. He didn't reall know how to set it up and I tried to help him out as much as I could but the NextStar controller is not very intuitive. We eventully got it pointed at the sun, but we didn't have the tracking set up correctly. Every so often it would slew off towards some other target if the wrong button got pushed.
We now had seven scopes.
Now it was time for the main event.
I started watching through my Mak and I think I was the first to call out when Venus started edging into the sun's disk.
I never got my web cam working correctly, so I don't have any good pictures. Rich and Andy had DSLR's on their scopes so they should have some good shots.
Through out the rest of the evening we had a steady stream of people. Some had seen flyers at the nature center, some found us through google, some where people Rich and I met during the eclipse. We had a lot of people come over from the soccer games. We even had people come out after their neighbors got home from soccer and told them about us.
You can see Andy seated on the far left of this shot.
My equipment performed without any issues through out the evening. Rich and Andy had some power issues. Rich and I were sharing my battery and his Atlas mount didn't like it. I suspect that the long thin wires on the power cord wasn't letting his scope get all the amps it needed. Rich pulled his car up next to his scope and plugged into his car and then it worked just fine.
My iOptron cube ran fine off the battery for the entire evening. When I got home, I hooked to the charge and it still had 95% of it's capacity remaining.
I think it was around 6 that our eighth scope arrived. It was another iOptron mounted scope with a filtered refractor. I didn't got the specs.
Eventually we lost the sun into the trees and most of the crowd had gone home. We decide to stay a while and show Saturn to a few die hards that were left.
There was also another guy, Craig, who had recently gotten a 70mm Power Seeker scope and he had come back with it so we could help him understand how to use it. I think Rich got him to a point where he actually got to see Saturn. I am pretty sure we will see more of him in the future.
It was an amazing evening.
Next I want to thank Rich for organizing the event with the Saint Charles Park District.
The weather and the turn out were amazing! It could have been a little less windy, but I am not going to complain.
There were no clouds to worry about at all.
I got to our chosen site by 3:00 PM and started setting up the canopy. The original plan had been to set up the canopy with a shade panel on the west side so that we could have a shaded spot for some laptops, but the wind was trying to turn the panel into a sail so we gave up on that part of the plan.
Before I had finished with the canopy Rich arrived with his gear. Before long we had 4 filtered scopes and a sun funnel pointing at the sun.
At one point Rich and I looked up and saw this guy walking across the parking lot with the OTA for a NextStar C11. His name was Andy and he had driven down from Toronto! He wanted to make sure that he was somewhere with good weather for the event. Rich drove him back to his car which was on the far side of the soccer fields and showed him where the back road to our site was. Now we had six scopes.
Our site had soccer fields on both sides of us, so before long we were getting visitors and showing them the sun and explaining about the transit and sun spots.
I met so many people and I don't remember all of them now. Sorry
Another guy showed up. He was a teacher and theoretical physicist from the south side. He had another NextStar. I think it was an 6 inch. It had been given to him by a former student to use for astronomy classes at the high school. He didn't reall know how to set it up and I tried to help him out as much as I could but the NextStar controller is not very intuitive. We eventully got it pointed at the sun, but we didn't have the tracking set up correctly. Every so often it would slew off towards some other target if the wrong button got pushed.
We now had seven scopes.
Now it was time for the main event.
I started watching through my Mak and I think I was the first to call out when Venus started edging into the sun's disk.
I never got my web cam working correctly, so I don't have any good pictures. Rich and Andy had DSLR's on their scopes so they should have some good shots.
Through out the rest of the evening we had a steady stream of people. Some had seen flyers at the nature center, some found us through google, some where people Rich and I met during the eclipse. We had a lot of people come over from the soccer games. We even had people come out after their neighbors got home from soccer and told them about us.
You can see Andy seated on the far left of this shot.
My equipment performed without any issues through out the evening. Rich and Andy had some power issues. Rich and I were sharing my battery and his Atlas mount didn't like it. I suspect that the long thin wires on the power cord wasn't letting his scope get all the amps it needed. Rich pulled his car up next to his scope and plugged into his car and then it worked just fine.
My iOptron cube ran fine off the battery for the entire evening. When I got home, I hooked to the charge and it still had 95% of it's capacity remaining.
I think it was around 6 that our eighth scope arrived. It was another iOptron mounted scope with a filtered refractor. I didn't got the specs.
Eventually we lost the sun into the trees and most of the crowd had gone home. We decide to stay a while and show Saturn to a few die hards that were left.
There was also another guy, Craig, who had recently gotten a 70mm Power Seeker scope and he had come back with it so we could help him understand how to use it. I think Rich got him to a point where he actually got to see Saturn. I am pretty sure we will see more of him in the future.
It was an amazing evening.
