Last night, one of the local high schools had an "Early Childhood Carnival" as a way of introducing parents and youngsters to some of the services available in town to prepare children for Kindergarten. There were information booths, face painting, train rides, police cars, fire engines, pizza, sno cones, and oh yes, the Brazos Valley Astronomy Club.
I brought three telescopes for the occasion: 1) Zoomie, my 12-inch Dob with solar filter, 2) Cutie, my 80mm refractor with sun funnel, and 3) the club's Coronado Solarmax Hydrogen-alpha telescope which I had borrowed for the past couple of months. Two other club members showed up (Tim and Joel) and neither of them had telescopes capable of solar viewing, so we each had a telescope to operate.
Nature did its part as well, and the morning overcast skies had cleared up enough to allow us to see the sun all evening, with just a few passing clouds interrupting us briefly. The sun was being obstinate, however, and declined to show us any sunspots or big prominences.
Still, our booth was a popular one. Even though it was basically just a big bright ball, people enjoyed being able to look at the sun. I put a yellow filter on my sun funnel scope to reduce the glare a bit, so depending on which scope the people looked through, they could see the sun as being either red, white, or yellow. This gave us an opportunity to explain about filters to those who were interested.
The only downside to the evening happened near the end. One of the kids was using Joel's stepstool to see the sun through Zoomie and suddenly decided that its eyepiece rack was a good place step onto to try to get a better view. Of course, the rack wasn't designed to support the weight of a small child, so the two screws holding the rack to the pressed wood base snapped out and the rack crashed to the floor. In its place were two gaping holes in the wood base where the screws used to be.
I believe I can repair it fairly easily, but it was still heartbreaking to see my pride and joy suffer damage. Looking back on things, I'm pretty lucky that with all the outreach I do, this was the first time something like this has happened. I guess I was due, and it can be fixed without costing much money, so I'm grateful for that.
I wasn't upset at the kid. He didn't know any better. He wanted a better look and just used bad judgment. I was upset at myself for not keeping a better eye on my telescope. And I was even more upset at the kid's parents. They never scolded the child nor apologized to me. They saw what he did and then just grabbed him and quickly walked away as if nothing had happened. They missed a good opportunity to show their child how to act responsibly.
After the event, I asked myself a couple of hard questions:
Do I still want to do outreach? Yes, definitely. It's too much fun.
Do I still want to bring Zoomie along, or should I just bring my smaller, cheaper telescopes? Zoomie is always a big hit at these things, so I think I will still use her, although I'm thinking that when I know mostly younger kids will be there, maybe my 8-inch Dob will be a better choice, because it's lower to the ground and won't require a step stool (and is also cheaper to replace if something goes wrong).
Despite the mishap, I had a lot of fun at the event, and I believe the people visiting our booth did, too. All in all, I think I handed out about 75 NASA stickers, so counting the adults, we probably had about 250-300 people in attendance, and everyone (even the kid who broke my eyepiece rack) was pretty well-behaved.