Due to cloudy skies, we have cancelled the viewing scheduled for Saturday, October 12, 2013.
The weather is looking clear for tomorrow evening, so we are tentatively scheduling a viewing for Sunday, October 13, 2013 from 7:00 to 9:00 PM. The forecast will be evaluated later tomorrow and an update posted if this viewing also needs to be cancelled (Keep your fingers crossed for clear skies!).
If the viewing goes ahead, those wishing to attend are asked to meet in Memorial Building Room 417.
UPDATED 5:17 PM October 12 – This viewing has been cancelled due to weather. Please see most recent website post for information about the “cloud”-date viewing.
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We have a public viewing scheduled for Saturday, October 12 from 7:00 to 9:00 PM. Those attending the viewing are asked to meet in Memorial Building Room 417.
The weather forecast is looking pretty good now, but with a chance of clouds which may interfere with viewing depending on where they land in the sky. If the weather isn’t appropriate for viewing on Saturday, an update will be posted here by 6:30 PM.
We have a “rain”-date scheduled for Sunday at 7:00-9:00 PM in the event of cancelling Saturday’s event.
Our Introductory Astronomy (Physics 251) students were observing the Moon during their laboratory session last night which included a telescope viewing. Many of them took photos of the telescope’s Moon view by holding their phone-cameras up to the eyepiece. As you can see in the photo below, with a steady hand a nice photo can be obtained.
The waxing crescent Moon as seen through the UPEI telescope on October 10, 2013. (Photo by Alex Stavert)
We’re hoping to offer some astrophotography opportunities (that won’t require such steady hands!) at some of our future public viewings. We’ve just received an Orion SteadyPix Deluxe Camera Mount to fit over our new telescope’s eyepiece.
The camera attachment post on the lateral bar will screw into the base of most cameras, allowing the camera to rest in front of the telescope eyepiece. We’ve tried fitting the device onto our telescope today and now need to test it out with some cameras before it’s ready to make its public debut.
So, with any luck, you’ll soon see a notice on this site for a bring-your-own-camera public viewing.
Potential viewing for Sep 14th canceled due to projected overcast skies and rain.
As of 3:45pm on Sunday, the weather looks reasonable for the viewing tonight (lack of clouds, unsettled atmosphere). As the atmosphere will be too unsettled to try to deep sky objects, we’ll be focusing on the moon tonight.
One of the main viewing objects of the August 24th session was the Ring Nebula. It’s an object that can’t be resolved with binoculars and is almost directly overhead in our Northern summer skies.
Nebulae and other deep sky objects benefit from having a larger telescope to collect faint light, having a calm atmosphere (Saturday was “average”), and having little to no light pollution. The best case, as in the Hubble telescope pictures, is to be above the Earth’s atmosphere completely, but that’s not something easily arranged. The pictures in the Wikipedia article linked above are very nice examples, some digitally enhanced. We pushed the edge of a couple of those categories, but most people were able to see the “ring” aspect of the nebulae (this link leads to a picture closer to what we saw).