Observatory

About two weeks ago we had our first public night at the observatory.  (I've been procrastinating on writing this post...).  It went really well!  There were probably a good 30-40 people there, and it was a good mix of faculty, staff, students, public, kids, a photojournalist (who took the above photo), and local amateur astronomers.  Those amateur astronomers are pretty hard core.  They were less interested in social interactions (read: saying "hello" to me) and more interested in getting me to turn the outdoor lights off.  But anyway, it was a good show and the telescope was behaving better than it ever had so far.  I have been having trouble with the software's pointing, so it is often off by several degrees.  As a result I hadn't previously tried to observe anything faint.  But the pointing was great, so I was able to see all kinds of faint things!  Of course the downside of having a huge crowd is that it takes forever for everyone to see something, so we were on Saturn for most of the night.  But after that we got to see some really great globular clusters and open clusters, and even some galaxies (M81 and M104).  I was pretty impressed with the telescope and dark sky, and am excited to play with it some more.  The next public night is tomorrow but it looks like it will get rained out.  Oh well.  (That means I get to go to trivia night instead.)

A side note about the observatory.  Before I got here the builders had made the decision to make a doghouse-style observatory with sliding roof.  So the telescope is on a pier that goes up and down.  I had never seen this before and was a little skeptical.  But it actually turns out to be really nice.  You can raise and lower the telescope depending on where the eyepiece ends up when you are pointing at something, and you can lower it for kids or short people.  It has been really useful for that.  It actually was a big mental exercise for me to see that raising and lowering it doesn't change what you are pointing at.  It seems very weird.  I am curious to see how it might affect more precise pointing when I get the CCD on, but for now it is working well.

And I'm sure that you guys all saw this on facebook, but for posterity's sake I'll include it here.  There was a really great article about me and the observatory in the Kingston newspaper.  I got the paper version and it is really awesome.  There is a special insert on things to do around town, and the story is the front and back covers plus the first two inside pages.  It includes all the pictures that are in the online article!