Our astronomy club was invited to attend a Science Night at one of the local middle schools. The event was from 6pm to 8pm, so we were hoping we could show off the sun through a solar filter, even though we are at a sunspot minimum right now.
But, as is usual for my outreaches of late, the skies turned completely overcast. Warren and I decided to go anyway and try to show the kids a good time with a bit of indoor astronomy.
I brought Zoomie (12" dob) and Cutie (80mm refractor) along, to show the differences between a refractor and a reflector. I also brought along a trifold display showing a comparison of various telescope types. It's an old display that is in bad need of updating and modernizing, but I didn't have time to make a new one. And just in case Zoomie didn't draw enough attention on her own, I brought Cosmos, my inflatable astronaut.
For his part, Warren brought his 10-inch dob and his brand new home-built observing seat. He had just finished it this morning, and did an outstanding job on it! You can see it in the photo below.
Despite there only being about half a dozen booths, the event was well attended. I estimated about 100 kids and parents came by our display.
We were at one end of a large gymnasium. I had printed out an optometrist's eye chart and taped it to the far wall of the gym. I then aimed Cutie at the chart and let the kids see if they could read the letters. They were amazed that they could, but asked why the letters were backwards. Then I had them look through my RACI on my dob and they saw the same chart only the letters were correctly oriented. This was a great opportunity for us to explain the differences in how mirror and lens systems worked.
Our big dobs weren't able to achieve focus indoors, so I just left out my eyepiece and let the kids see the reflections of their eye in the secondary and the gym in the primary. Most of them had a lot of fun looking at their friends. Warren brought a spare diagonal, and the extra light path length was just enough to allow him to achieve focus with his.
One little girl with glasses looked in the eyepiece and started reciting the letters she saw on the eye chart. I told her she passed her eye exam, and she just giggled. Her mom smiled at me and said that the girl has a lot of vision problems and spends a lot of time at her eye doctor's office. She always loves it when she's able to pass an eye exam, so I made her night.
Some of the other displays at the Science Night included colors and spectra, get your photo taken as a single-celled organism, and a wildlife display that had a live falcon and owl. I think our booth managed to be even more popular than those!
Who says you can't do effective outreach on a cloudy night?