Cloudy skies with snow flurries greeted 23 visitors (18 children and 5 adults) from the 82nd London Guides for Exploring the Stars, at the Cronyn Observatory, Monday, March 24th, 2014, 6:30 p.m. Graduate student Shannon Hicks made the digital slide presentation The Scout / Guide Astronomy Badge and, after fielding some questions, brought everybody upstairs into the dome.
RASC London Centre was represented by Everett Clark and Bob Duff. Everett set up the London Centre’s 25.4cm Dobsonian (17mm Nagler eyepiece, 66X) on the roof patio and directed it towards the weathervane on the Engineering building. He briefly brought the optical tube inside during a light snow flurry. Since snow flurries ruled out opening the dome, Bob gave a talk about the history of the Cronyn Observatory and the technical aspects of the big 25.4cm refractor. He explained the 2 clocks on the east wall of the dome and the difference between Standard and Sidereal Time. Bob then supervised as the Guides lined up to look at the weathervane through the 25.4cm Dobsonian.
When everybody was back downstairs, Shannon introduced the activity Constellations and distributed 21 Star Finder planispheres. She used a slide showing a Star Finder planisphere and slides of the constellations to show them how to use them. Everybody was gone by around 8:20 p.m. after an interesting and enjoyable evening learning about astronomy, despite the cloudy sky.