Pacheco public star party

by Matthew Marcus

I was at Pacheco as well. The seeing wasn't THAT bad, but not that good, either. Cassini did show up, as did intermittent glimpses of detail on Jupiter's belts. Good enough for public :-) Afterwards, I stayed up with another guy (sorry, forgot your name) and did some mooning. We identified Aristarchus, Schro:ter's Valley and some other big landmarks. Not much by most people's standards, but neither of us had paid much attention to that Big Bright Thing. The seeing was good enough to enjoy that level of detail. Just as we were thinking of packing up, at 11:30, came a woman with four kids in tow, so back to public star-party mode! The woman asked me if I believed that the stars and planets could predict the future. When I said that I didn't, she said, "But you're an astrologer, aren't you?". Maybe there are star-gods, for I'm not sure where else I would have got the patience to explain that I'm an amateur *astronomer* and that astrology is different. Fortunately, she wasn't inclined to take it any farther. I was not surprised to find out that she listened to Art Bell and was unaware of the existence of talk radio to the left of Rush Limbaugh.

My interactions with the public before 11:00 went considerably better. They were all blown away by the Big Three (Jupiter, Saturn, Venus). Lots of them were amazed to find that Venus had phases like the moon and wanted to know why, which I explained as clearly as I could. At one point, I modeled the system with the moon as the sun, my head as Venus (high enough albedo, these days :-) and the questioner as the observer on Earth. I think that worked. Still, it's somewhat dismaying that people don't grasp such basic ideas about the world around them, but gratifying that they can be interested under the right circumstances.

One member of the public noticed that we were all men and asked Jim Bartolini why that is. Good question. Jim noted that there are women in this game and acknowledged that there should be more.

The turnout was light, for several reasons. One is that there's a huge May Day fair in Los Banos, a fact of which Jennifer the Ranger wasn't aware (she's not native to the area). Another is that Jennifer sent out 2000 flyers to a certain person at a school district, and the flyers bounced back. Seems that the recipient didn't work at the district anymore, and nobody at the district thought that maybe the flyers should go to the person who holds the former job of the addressee. As Mark Twain put it, "First God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made school boards". She's going to give it another go next year and see if it works better. Be prepared for the Invasion of the Fourth-Graders! If this works, it will be like something out of a Simpsons episode :-)

Thanks to Albert for organizing this event. It's always good to share with others what we find so special. It's also appropriate payback for getting to use public land for our eccentric activities.

Posted on sf-bay-tac May 02, 2004 15:55:07 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.1 Jul 11, 2004 09:06:07 PT