Last night 9/9/00, Akkana and I did the FPOA public program. We presented a lunar program, with slides of lunar features, and a few constellation and deep sky slides to show what else we'd be looking at that night through the 30 incher Challenger telescope that night. This slide presentation was followed by a lunar sketching activity we've been wanting to try out. We handed out little sketchpads Akkana made and let those who were interested sketch. We had 8 little "clipboards" and many more budding sketchers than materials. We had examples of our own sketches and explained how to start a sketch, and let them go to the telescopes to see what they wanted to sketch. Then they came into the classroom to compare their sketches with our RUKL charts. Or to find out what they were looking at. It was a fun and interesting program.
Some examples of lunar sketches can be found at:
http://www.whiteoaks.com/sketches/ (mine)
Akkana's are on her website: http://www.shallowsky.com/moon/hitchhiker.html under the "index to lunar features"
It was a good mooning night and then we looked at M57 and M13 and Uranus and many of its moons. A few other objects were looked at through 4 refractors out in front. The 40 or so visitors had a great time. So did we.
We did make a discovery last night, however. Just as we were finishing up for the night we looked throught the 20x100 binoculars mounted on the south opening of the observatory. Dave North made the discovery, so I can't take credit for it. He announced "here's Scorpius". Right in between Formalhaut and B Cetus was Scorpius Minimus, the little scorpion asterism. The whole asterism fit in the field of view of the binoculars. Today we pulled up the area on SkyMap Pro, and sure enough, there was our asterism! 103 and 104 Aquarii made up the "pinchers" of the scorpion. 106, 107 and 108 Aquarii made up the thorax area, and TYC 6408 1355-1, 620-1 and 1347-1 made up the tail.
It was a great finish to a fun night.