Star Gazing

Thursday night, we decided to head to the Fountain Hills Library. Fountain Hills Friends of the Library was sponsoring a star party with professional astronomers and powerful telescopes. We were a little worried when some cloud cover moved in, but the telescopes were strong enough to peer right through them.

It was a cute set up. There were free glow necklaces/bracelets, animal crackers (Michael apologizes for eating about half of them; and yes, that's him at the table), and even hot drinks like hot chocolate. We had hit a high of 80 that day, and I was still dressed for that. It got cold out (in Renee-speak), so a hot beverage was a nice offering. Oh, and Star Wars music. I can not forget the music. Nice touch.



Inside the library, which was open until 9pm, they had a cute little display.



There was a good crowd, probably about 30 people in the first hour.

I think they've had these gatherings before, but with one telescope, so everyone would have had to stand in line to see whatever the telescope was programmed to see. This time, someone donated 4 or 5 more to the cause, hoping to keep wait times down. The telescopes are hooked to GPS units that can be set up to look at whatever you want to see in the sky. You just select the GPS point, and the telescope moves to the desired star/planet/cluster/galaxy. It would have been really cool had they worked like that, but all but one of the telescopes had been shipped that day, and they were not calibrating properly. The poor guy worked and worked and worked on it, but the equipment was not cooperating.

Photo from Wikipedia

The astronomer stood by the one that did work, and we got to see the moon (in its crescent stage), the green gasses around Orion's Belt,

masseffect.wikia.com

and Jupiter. There was even an app on the astronomer's iPad that showed us how Jupiter's moons looked and moved around the planet, in real time.

It was pretty neat. While we were waiting around, I copied off another person and downloaded an app to my smartphone so I could hold my phone up to the sky and know what I was looking at. It sort of worked...


Here are three photos from Lori Burns Derwent's Facebook page (she said I could):


Yep, that's what people looking through a telescope look like. 

It was also interesting to learn that the light we see from the moon left the moon less than 2 seconds prior. But the light from, say, Sirius (the brightest star in the sky), was at least 1,200 years old. It had left the star during the time of the Roman Empire! Some of the other lights we could see started their journeys millions of years ago and were probably of long-dead stars/planets.

We would have liked to have stayed longer, but we started getting cold and had a moped ride, albeit a short one, ahead of us. The telescopes were available for 3 hours (until 10pm), so hopefully they managed to get them all up and running. Thanks to the volunteers; that was fun.



Note per the Fountain Hills Friends of the Library: The Library Resale Book Shop needs book donations! On March 22nd we will have a book sale from 9am until 4pm and currently we have a shortage of books available for sale! This sale is a major fundraiser for the Fountain Hills Friends of the Library, and we need your book donation. Fiction and non-fiction books of all types that are in good condition. PLEASE DONATE TODAY! If you would like to donate large collections of well preserved books, ask at the Book Shop in the library lobby for assistance, or you can call (480) 734-7117 to make arrangements for pickup.