(Cancelled) October 12, 2013 – Public Viewing

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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.

Astrophotography Coming Soon

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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.

MoonByAlexStavert

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.

CameraMount.jpgSo, with any luck, you’ll soon see a notice on this site for a bring-your-own-camera public viewing.

Sep 14/15th, 2013 viewing

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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.

Aug 24th, 2013: Ring Nebula

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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).

Upcoming viewings for August 2013 to March 2014

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An issue we’ve had with our Saturday viewings is there seems to be many occasions when the weather is overcast/raining/storming/etcetera on Saturday while Sunday is clear.  We recognize that Saturday evening would still be a better night for many people, especially those with children still in elementary school, so we’re enacting a scheduling format change.

The new policy, starting in September, will be to schedule viewings on the SECOND Saturday of the month (instead of the 3rd) and then to have Sunday evening as a “rain-date” if the Saturday is cancelled.  We could still have overcast skies both evenings, but there’s a greater chance that one of the viewings will run.  We will focus on setting up viewings in September – April and then only run viewings in the summer if there is a particular event or a group-organized viewing.

The August viewing with be slightly anomalous as due to a scheduling issue, we are offering it on August 24th instead of August 17th.

Viewings August 2013 to April 2014 (Dates in red corrected August 21, 2013)

Month, Year Saturday Sunday(only possible if Saturday cancelled) Start to End Time
August, 2013 24 N/A 8:30-10:30pm
September, 2013 14 15 7:45-9:45pm
October, 2013 12 13 7:00-9:00pm
November, 2013 9 10 7:00-9:00pm
January, 2014 11 12 7:00-9:00pm
February, 2014 8 9 7:00-9:00pm
March, 2014 8 9 7:45-9:45pm