[Chaos-l] Observing Report From Lunar Eclipse Session

[Robert Nielsen]

Last night, the Morehead Planetarium hosted a lunar eclipse observing 
session on the sundial in front of the planetarium ... and in spite of 
the discouraging cloud cover right at the beginning of the session, it 
was a success, in my opinion!  I'm not sure about the number of people 
that attended ... but judging by the length of the line behind my 
telescope to see Saturn, I would guess there was between 100 and 200 
people there ... possibly up to 300.    At 8:30, when the session began 
(and the moon entered the penumbra), I thought we were in serious 
trouble concerning the clouds.  By 9 PM or so, the entire sky was 
covered with thick clouds, offering only seconds of visibility to the 
moon every now and then.   But as the totality approached, more and more 
"holes" in the clouds appeared, and between 10 PM and 11 PM ... it was 
actually pretty good.   Everyone who stayed got a good view of the 
eclipse, and views of Saturn through the various scopes.

Some interesting anecdotes from the session:

During the "cloudy" period early on ... people would wander by and ask 
"was this the place to see the eclipse?".   I would answer "yes", and 
more often than not, people would ask "where is it"?  I would politely 
answer that it was behind the clouds roughly toward the south and point 
in the general direction.   I was standing next to my telescope (which I 
admit is impressive to "muggles") and they wanted to know if they could 
see the eclipse through the telescope.   Again, I answered ... it's 
behind the clouds.    Sigh ...

Multiple times during the night, some undergraduate coeds from UNC would 
see Saturn through my telescope and say things like "no way!" and "shut 
up!" when I told them they were just looking through lenses and mirrors 
at the real planet out in space.  A little while later, the SAME folks 
would show up, with 3-5 additional people ... just to see Saturn and the 
eclipse.   So there IS advantage to holding an observing session in the 
middle of town ... where visitors can immediately bring other visitors 
back to the site!

One of the things I wanted to do during the night was to try to take 
some pictures of the eclipse (see my earlier posting for the URL to see 
the pictures).   Right about the time of the totality (roughly 10:30 PM) 
... I broke into the line of people waiting to see Saturn through my 
scope and told them I needed to take some pictures (my camera was 
piggybacked on my scope).   Believe it or not, some people actually 
GRUMBLED because they had to wait in line a little longer to see 
things.   I guess that's the problem with public sessions ... no real 
"science" can really happen.   In any case, they figured out I really 
did have priority on my own scope, and settled down.

I was ready, and counted the number of times someone said (looking at 
Saturn through my telescope for the first time) "it looks just like a 
sticker" - 79 times.

Still ... the experience of being there when an 8-year-old kid sees 
Saturn ... and says "WOW!" ... is priceless.   I never get tired of it.

Thanks again to the Morehead Planetarium for holding the session out 
front ... and inviting us to join.   Walter and I were worried that this 
was another one of those "once in a long while" astronomical events that 
was going to be "rained out" ... but eventually the weather 
cooperated.   It was a fun night ... especially when I got the text 
message that Duke had lost to Miami!!!!!!

Robert