Graduate student Parshati Patel made a combined digital slide presentation of “Our Solar System” and “The Small Bodies in Our Solar System” before 21 visitors, including 16 young people (mostly students and several young children) and 5 adults, from the Catholic Central High School Grade-11 class for Exploring the Stars at the Cronyn Observatory, Monday, February 24th, 2014, 7:00 p.m. Following her presentation Parshati fielded questions from the group.
RASC London Centre was represented by Everett Clark and Bob Duff. Since cloudy skies and snow flurries ruled out opening the dome, Bob gave a talk about the history and technical aspects of the big 25.4cm refractor and explained the Standard and Sidereal Time clocks on the east wall.
Everett had set up the London Centre’s 25.4cm Dobsonian (17mm Nagler eyepiece, 66X) inside the door to the roof patio and Bob supervised as the visitors lined up to view the weathervane on the Engineering building. The visitors were mostly gone by 8:45 p.m. after a very enjoyable evening learning about astronomy.