Member Reports Hands on activities saved the day!

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Hands on activities saved the day!

Apr 28
2010
by Thilina Heenatigala
Astronomy Day and Global Star Party at Astronomical Society of Northern New England

On April 24th Astronomical Society of Northern New England in Kennebunk, Maine celebrated Astronomy Day and held their Global Star Party. Members met at the Starfield Observatory at 1:00 PM to view the sun and to prepare for the night’s star party. Only a few members of the public came to look through the telescope. Unfortunately the event had not been well publicized.

Photos in the full article.


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Grace, Brad, and Gene are getting the 10 inch Dob ready for solar viewing. Unfortunately there were no sunspots.

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Bob, Grace, and Budd were looking through the 8 inch Zeiss refractor with H Alpha filter, but no prominences were visible.

Things may have been getting a little boring, as you can see some of our club computer gurus are so bored that they are using the computers instead of doing astronomy stuff.

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Bob, Alan, and Jim talking computer talk

After a while, Joan decided to liven things up with some very exciting NASA Night Sky Network activities. First she did a meteor activity.

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Gene, Budd, and Joan at the meteorite activity

Then she brought out the little white moons on sticks and convinced all the people there to do the moon phases activity. This was tremendous fun and everyone marveled at being able to put their moons under the real moon and turn slowly with their moons held high to watch them move from phase to phase until they were back to the original phase. These pictures show you how much fun even these adults could have with this activity. We spent a lot of time laughing! The following slides show us making moon phases using the sun, our heads as the Earth, and our moons.


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After such an exhilarating activity with the moon, it was time to bring out the yard sticks and beads and to make lunar and solar eclipses, using shadows. This is another very exciting NASA Night Sky Network activity.

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That night we attempted to see things in the sky, but the cloud cover was pretty bad. We did manage to look at Saturn, Mars, M3, and some double stars, and we had a wonderful time being with our astronomy buddies.


Report and Pictures by Joan Chamberlin
Astronomical Society of Northern New England, Vice President
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