The College Station Department of Recreation, Parks and Tourism Sciences hosted a public star party on Friday, February 22 and invited the Brazos Valley Astronomy Club to set up some telescopes and join them. BVAC had several enthusiastic volunteers but as the day crept closer, we began to realize that weather was going to be a major concern.
Sure enough, the day of the event was beset by overcast skies and intermittent light rain. The RPTS had rented a portable planetarium for the event and sold tickets, so they didn't want to cancel. They agreed to move us to an area where our telescopes would be protected from the weather and our club sent frantic messages back and forth to come up with some rainy day ideas to hold the attention of kids and adults alike.
I brought Zoomie, my 12-inch Dob, and Cutie, my little 80mm refractor. Even though I knew there'd be no way to view any celestial objects, the telescopes would let folks see for themselves what they looked like and how they worked. Also, their presence would be an attention-grabber for our table.
Besides the telescopes, I brought some packets of freebies from NASA, containing stickers, paper models of the New Horizons spacecraft, bookmarks, etc. I also brought the club's scale model of the solar system which uses beads and styrofoam balls of varying sizes.
Warren brought his new 11" SCT and tripod, as well as his handmade observing chair. Stephanie made some paper planispheres to hand out and also gave away several red-filtered flashlights. Jim brought his laptop, a projector and screen to show off some of Randy's amazing astrophotography as another attention-grabber. Ginger kept busy talking to the visitors and taking photos of the event. When all was said and done, I think we had a pretty impressive booth!
Despite the poor weather, we had a steady stream of people stopping at our booth throughout the evening. Everyone loved the freebies of course, but a lot of people seemed to enjoy learning how a planisphere worked and how small Earth was in comparison to other planets in the solar system. I've included a few pictures of the event taken by Ginger.
At the end of the evening, I think we all felt that it was a success. I heard estimates that we had about 100 visitors. Not bad for a rainy night! A representative from the RPTS expressed her enthusiasm about our participation and asked if we'd be willing to come again on hopefully a clear night. We assured her that we would.
One of the takeaways from this evening was that it's important to have some simple and fun outreach activities for those times when the stars aren't accessible. I think we did an amazing job of getting stuff together on a short notice, but with many of our outreach events happening indoors due to weather, it would be good to have a plan already in place.