Regrettably the clear skies that greeted us at the start of our venture from Hamilton didn’t follow us to North Toronto, but approximately 40 members and guests enjoyed the trip to York University.
After stops for refreshments and appropriate enticements for the York students, we arrived around 8pm and were greeted by Dr. Paul Delaney and 2 of his undergrad students: Christian and Ian. All were very knowledgeable, friendly and patient as they showed us around the observatories and the 2 main scopes: a 40cm Meade LX200 and a 60cm f/13 Cassegrain.
As part of their very active outreach programs, they host free weekly public observing nights on Wednesdays at the observatory. So if you missed this trip, you can go down on any Wed night and join one of the public nights.
And for the IYA, they are running a 2-hour live web cast from the observatory on Monday nights. From this link, you can participate in the blog at any time and at select times, see what is being captured by the telescopes or the all-sky camera.
After our tours, we retired to one of the staff lounges where donuts were served and Paul held court to a captive audience. He answered questions on a wide range of topics including Mars exploration, telescope design, imaging technology, space tourism, manned missions to the moon and Mars, and more. As always, he was very gracious and very accommodating. He also had a selection of the official IYA Galileo moment cards and planispheres which he made available to anyone who wanted them.
We extend our deep and sincere thanks to Paul and his students for such an enjoyable night. Even though we weren’t able to observe, I hardly seemed to miss it with all the other interesting things being shown and discussed.
