[Chaos-l] Fwd: Statewide Star Party

Tue Apr 9 11:25:58 EDT 2013

So far AG has the GOLD STAR *. 8-)  

Thanks for the report Jon and you'll always be a member of CHAOS! 

Jayme Hanzak 
President of CHAOS 

CHAOS 
P.O. Box 3001 
Chapel Hill, NC 27514-0842 
http://www.chaosastro.org 
http://www.stauntonriver-starparty.org 

----- Original Message -----

From: "Jon Stewart-Taylor" <joncst at earthlink.net> 
To: chaos-l at rtpnet.org 
Sent: Monday, April 8, 2013 10:05:15 PM 
Subject: [Chaos-l] Fwd:  Statewide Star Party 

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How did everyone else do? Send a report and say who was there from CHAOS. 

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</blockquote>
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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