Educating the Office

By Dave Churilla

I work for the State of Nebraska at DAS-CF (which stands for Department of Administrative Services – Central Finance).  Over the past few years people here have become interested in my hobby of Astronomy, or at least they SAID they were interested (more likely they were being polite to listen to my Astronomical Ravings at times).  But on the off chance that they really were interested, I offered to have a little open house at my home to let people see what the Moon and Saturn looked like through a telescope.  15 people showed up.  I figured that it would be 30 minutes of looking through scopes then, a few oohs and aahs and everyone would settle down to drink and socialize the rest of the evening, but I was wrong.  The evening turned out to be a mini Outreach outing, so Bob Leavitt thought I should treat it as one.  I have to confess that as such it was rather successful.

 In planning the evening I also asked Jim Kvasnicka and Bob Leavitt if they’d mind coming over with their telescopes to show people the sights.  If they could, I’d plan to put the Moon in mine but hook up my video imager to it so people could use the hand controller and move around the Moon on their own.  They would alternate between the Moon and Saturn for views through their scopes.  The set up worked extremely well.  I was rather shocked when I attempted to put my video imager into my 2.5x PowerMate.  It worked very well and the image on the small TV was excellent.  People had a fun time using the hand controller and moving the scope to different regions on the Moon.  This might even be a nice thing to do at Hyde sometime. 

Both objects (the Moon and Saturn) came in very well as seeing was excellent.  It was good enough as it got dark to take the imager off of my scope and go for high power (317x – the 2.5x PowerMate and my 9mm Nagler) on Saturn.  5 Moons were visible, but I was stupid and forgot to look up which they were before the party began.  The only one we knew for sure was Titan.  But that didn’t matter as every one thought seeing the distant Moons was spectacular. 

The party lasted until 10 PM, when the last couple left.  What surprised me was the genuine interest everyone had.  Instead of a few peeks here and there, everyone hovered around the scopes the whole night (well, from around 8 PM on when we started getting the Moon in) and had great questions and showed a lot of interest about Astronomy in general.  While there weren’t as many people there as I’d hoped, the 15 who were really enjoyed the night and were very impressed, expressing a lot of interest in coming out to Hyde, and a few would like to come out to one of our Star Parties. 

Many thanks to Bob and Jim for helping out.  I had a great time.