|
|
|
Home Facebook Page Members Gloal Links .S&T Observing Page .Heavens Above .Space Weather Local Links .Bruneau Dunes .Centennial Observatory .Faulkner Planetarium |
Upcoming EventsMeeting and Star Party -- Saturday, September 8th.Herrett Center - 7:00 PM Astronomy Talk - Tycho Brahe -- Friday, September 14th. Herrett Center - 8:15 PM 
The Eclipse was a great success! We had about fifty people at the peak. Quite a few
left after the moon reached totality. Jay Michaels from KMVT stopped by during totality
to do some viewing, and file a report for the news at six and ten. Chris Anderson, Ken
Thomason and Rick Widmer were interviewed, and Tom Gilbertson was seen operating the 18"
JMI telescope, twice. I bet there are more familiar faces in the background...
The night started at Idaho Joe's, where David, Eric, Ken, John and Rick met for dinner and some pre-event planning. John headed home for a nap, and the rest headed to the observatory to get things set up. A little bit later Jay and Deb Hartwell arrived with a batch of fresh sticky rolls. Even with the early start time, we only had about an hour to spare before 2:30. From the time we started setting up, we left the door open, and had a group of four people show up for some early viewing while we worked. We started with three telescopes on the stargazers deck, the Meade 10", the Questar 7" and the JMI 14. Later in the night, Tom set up one of the 7" Questars. There were also at least three cameras set up. Ken had his piggy back mounted on the 24" scope. Tom and someone else had theirs on tripods. I can't tell you much about who hit what targets, but I do know we showed Jupiter, Mars and lots and lots of views of the Moon. A number of meteiors were spotted, as well as a hard to spot late twilight Iridium flare. The big scope stayed on the Moon, and for much of it we just used the Takahachi Astrograph to create a video feed for the monitors scattered around the observatory. At times the color camera we used showed more vivid color than looking at the moon. One cool thing we noticed early on, the 24" scope had a vivid image of the moon projected on the red dust cap. The moon was almost as large as the cap itself, and was amazingly sharp when focused. We now have a VHS tape that starts just before P1 (the beginning of the eclipse) until I had to stop tracking because the scope had gone below the 15 degree limit. I had to use the hand controller to move the scope out of the limits, The Sky refused to send any commands because we had gotten so low. We also have a set of three mini-DV tapes of the eclipse recorded with John's camera. They should be transcribed to DVD soon. We need to look for a way to store video like this as we produce it in the future. Special thanks to Geralyn who donated a 19" color television to the SHARE system. This allowed us to have three color monitors available. The 19" monitor is the second largest we have available, and has an excellent picture. You can download a flash movie that simulates the eclipse, and shows the view from Tycho crater on the moon. This is almost a 10MB download! You will need a recent version of the Flash Player to view the movie. (Most computers have this installed.) Download the zip file, then uncompress it into a new folder. Then you can double click on the eclipse.swf file to watch the movie. You are free to make copies and give it to your friends, as long as the content remains unchanged. DOWNLOAD HERE Look for previous contents of this page here. |