Starry Nights @ SFU: Blogs & Pics

Friday December 3 2011: Clouds & holes meet Jupiter & moons!

We finally had a genuine SFU star party on Friday December 3 after a very long hiatus - in fact, not counting star parties held with the RASC Vancouver, this was SFU's lone star party for all of 2011 :(-. It's been a busy year, alot of it working on development of the proposed SFU teaching observatory and science outreach centre! Good news is in the offing, and with it will come many more star parties!

I'm sure we were set to have the best attended star party ever, and the weather was great all day. But then ... clouds rolled in at sunset. The evening forecasts continued to call for clear skies, even as the clouds settled in for the long haul. Why is it that when the forecast calls for clear skies, it often turns cloudy, but that it never seems to happen that an unhappy forecast turns out to be wrong?

Anyway, it was a tough call whether to cancel the star party, or to go ahead and hope for the skies to improve. I can never make that call without much agony! I don't want our guests to come all the way up to the top of Burnaby Mountain for nothing, and neither do I want to cancel only to find the skies clearing while I'm on the bus home - that inevitable feeling of disappointment being shared by the many families with eager youngsters who would have turned out.

This time I figured we just had to continue with the star party, since this was our only shot for 2011! I weaseled a bit by asking the members of our mailing list to make their own judgment as to whether the skies would clear ;). In the end, about 75 guests came out, and most were treated to at least some celestial treats, as holes in the clouds came and went all evening. We got good views of the Moon, and Jupiter and some of its Galilean moons, and even a few deep-sky objects.

Intrepid Starry Nights @ SFU volunteers who came out with telescopes were Terry McComas, Steven Pettigrew, Ronan and Scott Kerr, Leigh Cummings, Mark Eburne, Alan Jones, Ciara Morgan-Feir, Diedre Sportack and her husband Aaron, and Steve Meighan.

Kevin Loh used his cell phone to snap a neat picture of the Moon (I think it was through Alan Jones' scope?).

And tonight six families earned their telescopes! Look for pictures of four of the happy scope families below! Unfortunately, I can't seem to find my pictures of the Carndinalls and the Brandls :(-.

I also tried using my iPhone camera to see if I could capture something of the feeling of being at one of our star parties!

Copyright © 2012 Howard Trottier

Starry-eyed
@ SFU since Nov. 2007