Clear skies becoming partly cloudy later greeted 27 visitors (17 children and 10 adults) from Jean Vanier Catholic School Grade-6 class for Exploring the Stars at the Cronyn Observatory, Thursday, October 9th, 2014, 7:00 p.m. Graduate student Parshati Patel made the digital slide presentation, “The Stuff of Stars” and followed this with the activity “Constellation”, distributing 20 “Star Finder” plansipheres and showing the visitors how to assemble and use them.
RASC London Centre was represented by Everett Clark and Tricia Colvin. Everett operated the big 25.4cm refractor in the dome and showed the visitors the star Vega (18mm Radian eyepiece, 244X). Tricia set up the Observatory’s 8-inch (20.3cm) Meade 2080/LX3 Schmidt-Cassegrain, showing the visitors Mars (20mm Plossl eyepiece, 100X) and later the one-day-past-full gibbous Moon (100X). Everybody was gone by 8:45 p.m. after an enjoyable and informative evening of astronomy.