[Chaos-l] Astronomy Day at Little River Park: April 24

[Jon Stewart-Taylor]

Hi all.  Please mark your calendars for Saturday, April 24.  CHAOS and  
Little River Park will be celebrating Astronomy Day, starting at  
3:00.  The park people are Very Interested in helping us make this a  
success, and the rangers have already talked about making this an  
annual event.

I've reserved the meadow and the adjacent large picnic shelter (room  
for about 30 people), so the daytime activities will take place  
regardless of the weather.   The rangers said the park can accommodate  
up to 400 people, so we could get quite a crowd. There is an  
electrical outlet for AC devices, both for daytime presentations and  
for night-time observing.

We (and by "we", i mean CHAOS members and interested members of the  
local astronomy community) will be giving presentations on various  
aspects of amateur astronomy.  If anyone would be interested, we can  
run a "so you've got a telescope gathering dust in your closet"  
workshop, both in the day, helping people set up, adjust, and/or fix  
telescopes, and in the evening to help them actually find/observe stuff.

As mentioned in a previous e-mail, the kinds of things i'm hoping we  
can present include:
astro-crafts for kids
starting astronomy
musical astronomy
light pollution
buying and using telecopes
telescope clinic
Scale solar system model
Safe solar observing
We also may be able to recycle things done at the NCSM "Astronomy  
Days" this weekend.

At the evening observing session, i was thinking we could do stuff like:
Constellation tour
Telescope clinic: finding and observing
Moon
Saturn
Star clusters
Double stars
Unfortunately, the first-quarter moon will be in the sky all night  
long, transiting around 9 pm, so galaxies and nebulae are going to be  
less than optimum.

If any of that appeals to you, or if you have an activity/presentation  
you'd like to do, please contact me.  The reservation has been made,  
now it's up to us to make this a success.

Thanks.

Jon Stewart-Taylor

joncst (at) earthlink.net

919-967-2912
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