Cloudy skies greeted 18 visitors (including 11 children and 7 adults) from the Jean Vanier Catholic School Grade-6 class to the Cronyn Observatory for Exploring the Stars, Tuesday, October 29th, 2013, 6:30 p.m. Graduate student Shannon Hicks presented the digital slide show “Our Solar System.” Graduate student Parshati Patel was also there, arriving around 7:00 p.m.
After a question and answer session, Shannon brought the group upstairs into the dome around 7:15 p.m. Since it was cloudy, Parshati gave a brief talk about the history and technical aspects of the big 25.4cm refractor and explained the 2 clocks on the east wall of the dome and the difference between standard and sidereal time. Everett Clark represented the RASC London Centre and directed the London Centre’s 25.4cm Dobsonian (17mm Nagler eyepiece, 66X) towards the smoke stack on the Engineering building and then the communications tower in south London. The big 25.4cm refractor (32mm Erfle eyepiece, 137X) was also directed towards the communications tower but had to be closed due to drizzling rain.
The visitors were gone by 8:00 p.m. after an interesting evening learning about astronomy and telescopes, despite the unfavourable.