Cloudy skies with rain showers greeted 8 visitors (5 girls and 3 adults) from the Talbot Street Church GEMS for Exploring the Stars at the Cronyn Observatory, Thursday, April 2nd, 2015, 7:15 p.m. Graduate student Parshati Patel made the digital slide presentation“Our Solar System” and fielded questions. Parshati followed this with the activity “Kitchen Comet”, making a comet from dry ice and other materials on a table set up at the front of the lecture room.
RASC London Centre was represented by Tricia Colvin, later joined by Mark Tovey. Rainy weather ruled out opening the dome and Tricia set up the London Centre’s 25.4cm Dobsonian (17mm Nagler eyepiece) inside the dome so as to view out the door and showed the visitors the compressed gas canister with gauges visible in the window of the nearby Engineering building to the south. Tricia and Mark gave a joint talk to them with Mark speaking on the history of the Cronyn Observatory and Tricia on the technical aspects of the big 25.4cm refractor in the dome. The visitors were gone by around 8:45 p.m. after an enjoyable evening of astronomy despite the cloudy, rainy weather.