Cloudy skies and rain greeted 44 visitors (including 29 children and 15 adults) from the homeschoolers group Kids Learning Connections to the Cronyn Observatory for Exploring the Stars, Tuesday, November 4th, 2014, 6:00 p.m. Graduate student Shannon Hicks made the digital slide presentation “Mars” and followed this with the activity “Crater Experiment”.
RASC London Centre was represented by Tricia Colvin and Mark Tovey, arriving at 5:30 and 6:15 p.m., respectively. Since it was raining, Tricia set up both the London Centre’s 25.4cm Dobsonian (17mm Nagler eyepiece, 66X) and the Observatory’s 8-inch (20.3cm) Meade 2080/LX3 Schmidt-Cassegrain (20mm Plossl eyepiece, 100X) inside the dome so as to view outside through the door to the roof patio. Tricia worked the 25.4cm Dobsonian and Mark the 20.3cm Schmidt-Cassegrain. The visitors viewed what appeared to be a compressed gas canister in an office in the Engineering building through the 25.4cm Dobsonian and at the TV screen visible in the Western Student Recreation Centre windows through the 20.3cm Schmidt-Cassegrain. The event wrapped up around 8:00 p.m. after an interesting evening of astronomy despite the rainy weather.