What a successful International Astronomy Day!
Despite some clouds, we had pretty good weather for both the afternoon solar observing session, and for the evening Lunar/Saturn public events.
In our afternoon event down at Lakeland Community Centre, we had 5 scopes set up from a 40mm Coronado PST up to an 8″ Schmidt. This provided a great variety to see the Sun with different luminosity and spectral views. Regrettably the small sunspot from earlier in the week had gone around the edge of the Sun, so we couldn’t see it, but Joe had some videos and images he collected from the SOHO website to show our visitors. However a little later the Sun did put on a bit of a show with a few small but distinct flares which we saw in the PST.
We had about 30-40 people show up, mostly drop-ins from the walking path nearby. Few had seen any of our promotions, however some had. A breezy afternoon with lots of clouds, but enough breaks the wait wasn’t too bad and most everyone who stopped got to see the Sun. A little last minute email blast on Fri resulted in a videographer from CH News coming out and doing a small segment on us which appeared on the 6pm news.
The evening session at Bayfront Park was very well received. We had more than a dozen scopes and when you add in the binos, we had about 2 dozen optical instruments trained at the Moon and Saturn. About 20 members of the HAA were on hand to share their love of astronomy with the public. I think each and everyone of them did our club proud. I saw so many smiling faces as people left.
We guessed we had about 130-150 people show up to enjoy the show. Many had seen one of our promotions, but a fair number were just in the area and were curious about the hub-bub. However the actual number may have been higher. We were so busy answering questions from a very interested audience, that we didn’t often take the time to look up and “count” the crowd. I think everyone who had a scope or bino set up had some crowd at one time or another. People were really interested in the different views each of the instruments would provide.
We handed out HAA brochures, copies of the EH and thanks to the generosity of SkyNews, free copies of their magazine they had donated to us to the information hungry crowd.
Towards the end of the night, I noticed standing quietly off to the side was Steve Ruddick from CH News with his son. Steve had called me earlier in the day and had expressed a personal interest in astronomy and made a point of stopping by. We had a nice chat and I was quite pleased in his interest.
By 10:30, things were starting to wind down, so we gradually packed up and 6 or 7 of us reconvened at a near-by Tim’s to relax and reflect on a successful day and night.
Our thanks to everyone who came out made this a very worthwhile event. It was great to share with the Hamilton area once again.
