We would like this page to focus on members observing sessions. Please share any observing that you do.
May 2/08 - Carol, Jim and Chris helped out with thier telescopes Friday night at Caw Caw's "Star Light Star Bright" program. We had 15 people attend the program. The sky was clear, and the first object we saw was Mercury. Later we showed the fokes M 36, 37, 38, 42. Planets, Saturn and Mars. Chris tried to view the Wirlpool Galaxy. Most of the viewers were not able to see it. It was a good night until Carol's corrector plate dewed up and she had to shut down for the night. It seemed like the favorite for the night was Saturn, Chris went back to Saturn several times during the night.
April 29/08 - Chris and Carol observed in Chris' backyard. He connected his telescope to his laptop and used it to find objects using a planetarium program. He has trees and lots of light but we had fun. We looked at the area around Bootes, Hercules, and Gemini. We looked at M and NGC objects, and galaxies. The galaxies were so faint that we started looking at double stars. The colors of the doubles were pretty and I may have found a new interest.
April 16/08- Chris Morrow used his new pier setup to try some astro photography on Wednesday night. His setup was an Atlas EQ6 mount with a Meade 10" LX200R OTA with a Astro Tech 66mm refractor for guiding. A Canon 350 DSLR, with a F6.3 focal reducer, was attached to the LX200R OTA for taking the pictures. The mount was controlled by computer using the program Cartes du Ciel, which is free ware, and PHD ( Push Here Dummy) by Stark Labs also free ware. Guiding was done through the refractor scope with a Meade DSI-C camera connected to the computer using PHD. Cartes du Ciel did all the object finding and PHD did the guiding. Cartes du Ciel put every object in the camera field of view, so all Chris had to do was click on an object in Cartes du Ciel and the mount slewed straight to the object and start taking pictures.Chris was limited to 30 second exposures due to light polution from the Moon and surrounding lights, He tried a 8 minute exposure of Capella and it was totally washed out, almost a white background instead of a black background. He was able to get fairly good photos of NGC 2169, NGC 2264, M 37, M 85, M 53 and M 3. All in all he had a good time expirmenting with scope, camera amd computer.
April 12/08- Kevin Rasso participated in the 2nd Annual International Sidewalk Astronomy Night from down in Georgia. He showed a lot of people everything from galaxies to open clusters, Mars, Saturn, and the Moon. His scopes were running from 8:00 PM to 3:00 AM! Best quote from the evening was "Oh my God...hey guys...come over here...you can actually see the rings of Saturn...for real...get over here!" It was a wonderful night!
March 11/08- Chris had first light with his new pier in his back yard Tuesday night. Conditions were good and visibility great. It took Chris about 2 hours to polar align his mount due not being able to see Polaris. He looked at Saturn, Mars and several Messier objects before calling it a night.
March 1/08 -Our last observing session at Givhans Ferry was a great success. Chris, Carol, Jim, Kirsten, Ryan and James had a good time looking through telescopes. We started soon after 8 and started "going to" Messier objects. The sky was clear and then high clouds appeared and then left. The views of Mars and Saturn were great. By 9 our list of M objects was long -we started with M67, 44,42, 41,9,78,50,46 and many more. The weather was nice so our feet stayed fairly warm and our telescopes stayed dry. We ended the night looking at the double cluster, M34.
Feb. 29/08 - CawCaw - Fourteen people came out to look at the stars. It was a little cloudy and by the time it was dark it was fairly clouded over. The public got some views of Mars and Saturn and some good information. The group was very interested and said they would try and come out at a later date.