June 2015

Skyscrapers recently completed a series of workshops on beginning astronomy, offered to both members and the public. The topics ranged from learning the constellations, observing the sky with binoculars and small telescopes, observing the sun, and understanding the sky coordinate system.

These workshops were well attended and enjoyed all. They were obviously a success, because we have been getting requests for more workshops. A few people have also requested more advanced offerings, such as CCD imaging and image processing. I am happy to report that we have already begun planning for another series of workshops to be offered this coming fall. If there is a topic you would like to see offered, please let me know.

This was also a very satisfying experience for our instructors, too. On behalf of Skyscrapers, I would like to thank Conrad Cardano, Steve Siok, Ian Dell’Antonio and Francine Jackson for volunteering as workshop instructors. I also wish to thank all of our members that helped out by answering questions and for operating our telescopes on the nights these workshops were offered.

Now that the summer season is approaching, we have some other activities to look forward to. On July 18th, Skyscrapers will be offering a “Pluto Party” and cookout to celebrate the New Horizons mission to Pluto. This will be just days after the closest approach, and we hope to show some close-up images of Pluto taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft. Additionally, weather permitting; we will outfit one of our telescopes with a CCD camera so that we can show our own images of distant Pluto within the constellation of Sagittarius. We will have more information in our next newsletter.