Clear skies greeted 23 visitors (12 children and 11 adults) from the Montessori School for Exploring the Stars at the Cronyn Observatory, Wednesday, April 23rd, 2014, 6:30 p.m. Graduate student Tony Martinez made his digital slide presentation Our Solar System—an updated version including material from the presentation The Small Bodies in Our Solar System—and then fielded questions.
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 Observatory’s roof patio and directed it towards the weathervane on the Engineering building. He also set up the Orion AstroView 6 (15cm f/5) Equatorial Reflector, recently donated by a student to Western University’s Physics & Astronomy Department and kept at the Cronyn Observatory. At first Everett set up the telescope on its EQ3 equatorial mount and then he swapped it on to the Sky-Watcher EQ5 SynScan mount used with the Cronyn Observatory’s 90mm Coronado Solar Telescope. Since the telescope’s finderscope was missing the SynScan computer on the EQ5 mount made it easier to direct the telescope.
When everybody arrived upstairs Tony began by showing people the communications tower in south London through the big 25.4cm refractor in the dome, using the 32mm Erfle eyepiece (137X). He soon directed the telescope towards Jupiter. Bob showed the visitors Jupiter and Mars through the 25.4cm Dobsonian (17mm Nagler eyepiece, 66X). Everett showed the visitors Jupiter through the Orion AstroView 6 reflector, using its 10mm Plossl eyepiece (75X) and the star Sirius, using its 25mm Plossl (30X) eyepiece. Everybody was gone by around 9:00 p.m. after a very enjoyable evening of astronomy.