[Chaos-l] Fwd: Statewide Star Party

[Jon Stewart-Taylor]

>
> How did everyone else do? Send a report and say who was there from  
> CHAOS.
>
>>
I'm no longer exactly part of CHAOS, but i am an alum.

There were two SWSP events down here, one at Carolina Beach State Park  
(CBSP), and one at Airlie Gardens (AG).  The CBSP session had no  
events other than just observing.  There were two telescopes, and  
about 100 members of the public attended, making for two very busy  
telescopes.

The AG session snowballed into a Big Event.  In addition to Airlie  
Gardens as the host, participating organizations included the Cape  
Fear Museum, New Hanover County (NHC) Extension Service, Cape Fear  
Astronomical Society, UNCW, NHC Library,  NC Aquarium at Fort Fisher,   
the local NOAA weather office, WWAY television, and a couple more i've  
forgotton.  They had the Starlab portable planetarium, astronomy  
stories, make-and-takes like planispheres, laser-guided constellation  
tours, 500-yard solar system model (we only had room for up to  
Uranus), and more.  Also, there were four telescopes.

Apparently the publicity department did their jobs, because over 1000  
members of the public attended the AG event.  Aproximately 200 people  
went through the model solar system, and the telescopes were  
constantly busy for the whole, all four showing only Jupiter to people  
who had never seen it before until just about the end of the night.    
Lines were pretty consistently in the 15-20 people long range for  
almost the whole 3 hours of the event, and only started to thin out at  
about 9:40. We got lots of comments about how beautiful the planet  
was, how they couldn't believe it was real, how they'd never had a  
chance to see through a telescope before.  The usual kind of public  
session comments, but so many and so fast.  The last 15 minutes we got  
to show people the Orion Nebula and open cluster M35, though two  
scopes were still on Jupiter.

Great event.  Still recovering.

J.

-- 
Jon Stewart-Taylor: 	e-mail: joncst at earthlink.net  	Twitter:  
@Jon_c_s_t	Phone: 910-602-1307
Cape Fear Astronomy: http://www.capefearastro.org/
Chapel Hill Astronomy: http://www.rtpnet.org/chaos





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