Pioneer Days


Things are crazy busy here at Wa-chur-ed Observatory, but I wanted to take a minute to tell you about the event we did last weekend, the Linn County Pioneer Picnic in Brownsville, OR.  This was a 3 day event filled with all manner of family fun.  We were located at the end of the vendor area, next to a rock climbing wall provided by the OR National Guard.  That drew a lot of people to the area, but was also a distraction.  In any case, it was great fun to watch kids climb the wall – especially the little ones, many of whom really impressed us with their strength and courage.

Overall, it was not a great success in terms of sales, but very successful as an outreach event.  We had a solar telescope set up in front of the mobile gallery on Saturday and Sunday (it was too cloudy on Friday), and a lot of people were thrilled to see details on the surface of the Sun.  Saturday night was the only chance to switch to a regular telescope for night use.  In fact, it was still cloudy at 9PM and I was about ready to pack up the telescope when Jupiter appeared through a hole in the clouds, so we decided to take a quick look at it, and were treated to quite a view:  Jupiter’s moons Europa, Ganymede, and Io were all positioned right around the rim of the giant planet.  Within minutes, 2 of them disappeared, so the timing was perfect.  I didn’t have a camera set up to capture it, but here is a simulation from a planetarium application:

There were only a few people around to see it, but they were all thoroughly impressed.  I’m sure there would have been more people if the sky had looked more promising.  In fact, by 10PM the sky was mostly clear and I spent an hour touring the sky.

Thanks to Linda for inviting us to the event, to Cindi for helping us get set up, and to Ray for rescuing us with extra gasoline!  And, of course, thanks to Juanita for helping me man the gallery and solar telescope.

 


About Greg Marshall

I am a retired electronics engineer and after a few months of enjoying my leisure I began to miss doing product development. My astronomy hobby always needed new solutions to unique problems, so I decided that whenever I came up with a good solution I would try to make it available to others.

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