Cloudy skies greeted 18 visitors (13 Grade 9-12 students and 5 adults) from the Oakridge Secondary School Science Club to the Cronyn Observatory for Exploring the Stars, Monday, November 18th, 2013, 7:00 p.m. Graduate student Dilini Subasinghe made the digital slide presentation “Our Messy Solar System” and followed this with the activity, “Kitchen Comet”, which involved making a comet with dry ice and other ingredients.
After the presentation and activity Dilini brought the group upstairs into the dome. Everett Clark represented the RASC London Centre and assisted Dilini with directing the big 25.4cm refractor, with the 32mm Erfle eyepiece (137X) installed, towards the communications tower in south London. The visitors enjoyed viewing the lights on the communications tower through the big telescope.
Everett also set up the London Centre’s 25.4cm Dobsonian telescope, with the 17mm Nagler eyepiece (66X) installed, inside the door to the roof patio and showed visitors the weathervane on the roof of the Engineering building.
Since it was cloudy, Dilini did 2 more slide presentations including “Misconceptions in Astronomy” and “The Big Bang”. Everyone was gone by 9:00 p.m. after an interesting and enjoyable evening about astronomy, despite the cloudy sky.