Star Party at Newport Art Museum
by Tracy Prell
Wow, what a turnout we had at the Newport Art Museum on Jan 14th! The museum kindly invited our organization Skyscrapers, Inc. to use their outside grounds to setup our telescopes and show their guests what they can actually see in the night sky!
Because of light pollution, people are only able to readily see and not very well, the moon, Venus and some of the brightest stars in the sky with the naked eye. It takes a decent telescope to view those other wonders and more with greater brightness and detail when the sky is obscured by the city lights!
After the museum's guests toured the stunning art gallery inside the John N. A. Griswold House, they were invited outdoors to see a ?real? telescope, some for the very first time. They viewed the night sky on one of the four telescopes that were setup by our members.
The museum's guests were able to view the Pleiades and the Orion Nebula, courtesy of Jim Hendrickson and his telescope. Jim is really is one of our experts in Astrophotography and has a collection of thousands of spectacular images! If you need advice on capturing images of the planets, occulations or deep-space objects, Jim is one of several of our members well versed in this field.
Skyscraper member Francine Jackson, who I refer to as the "Lady of the Constellations," is also a Staff Astronomer at Brown University's LADD Observatory and writes articles about the night sky on Brown's LADD Observatory's List Serv. Francine brought her small red Edmund Astroscan telescope pointed at the entire moon! What a "Terrific" view from such a small telescope! Telescopes such as these make great starter telescopes for anyone and you'll be amazed at what you can see. Edmund Scientific no longer makes this particular model that Francine has, but I did find one on Ebay with stand for about $100.
Jim Crawford brought his 80 mm refractor telescope which he also aimed at the moon but at a different area and using a higher magnification than Francine's. Jim was able to show more detail and brightness because the scope is more powerful.
Our President Bob Horton brought his beautiful hand built red 4.25" telescope pointed specifically at the terminator on the moon using 254X. We were able to view a large crater right on the terminator, it's interior in shadow, except for the very tip of it's central peak, which was lit up by the rising sun. That one peak eventually became two peaks, and a bit more of the interior, terraced the wall of the crater which came into view as the sun rose higher. I believe this crater was Theophilus, which lies between Sinus Asperitatis in the north and Mare Nectaris to the southeast about 100km in diameter and 14,000 feet deep and the central mountain, which has several peaks, is about 4,600 feet high.
So the museum's guests viewed three different perspectives of the moon and also viewed the Pleiades and the Orion Nebula. The people were thrilled and amazed at the images they saw with a display of excitement and enthuisam for Astronomy! This was certainly very appreciated and was a rewarding experience for our members. This is what public outreach is all about and Skyscrapers does it Best!
I also took a couple of beautiful interior photos of the museum as well which shows it's very unique architectural style of that time! The Newport Art Museum, was founded in 1912, and is located on 76 Bellevue Avenue in Newport, Rhode Island.
Many kudos to Bob Horton, Jim Crawford, Jim Hendrickson and Francine Jackson who were kind enough to donate their time traveling to Newport and setting up their own personal equipment for public outreach! We would like more of our members to assist in our star gazing events that promote our organization throughout Rhode Island and the surrounding area of Massachusetts. By doing so were not only educating the public, but making Skyscrapers more visible to the community which would attract more potential members to our organization.
Skyscrapers, Inc Rhode Island's Astronomical Society is located at 47 Peeptoad Road in North Scituate, RI. We are open for FREE Public Viewings on Saturday nights (weather permitting), but please visit our website at www.skyscrapersinc.org to see if our observatories are open! We support STEM (Science, Technology Engineering & Math) and also STEAM (Science, Technology Engineering, Art and Math).
Our members offer workshops and we have presentations from some of the world's Renown Astronomers and Scientists, like Kim Arcand NASA's Visualization Lead for the Chandra X-Ray Telescope and author of several books, but most recently "Coloring the Universe: An Insider's Look at Making Spectacular Images of Space" and "Light: The Visible Spectrum and Beyond," MIT Professor Anna Frebel and author of her newly released book "Searching for the Oldest Stars: Ancient Relics from the Early Universe" These books can be found on Amazon.com and are excellent reads. We also had the privilege of having Senior Editor of Sky & Telescope Magazine Kelly Beatty provide a superb presentation on New Horizons Spacecraft and our number one enemy "light pollution" and how, with the help of the International Dark Sky Association and Kelly Beatty we can stop it's progression by contacting out towns, cities and states.
Light pollution has a direct impact on our body's ability to get the proper sleep, the migration pattern of birds and all living creatures that roam the Earth that depend upon a dark sky. Light pollution wastes needless energy! The International Dark-Sky Association in Tucson, Arizona, an environmental group, estimates that one-third of all lighting in the U.S. is wasted, at an annual cost of about 30 million barrels of oil and 8.2 million tons of coal-a total of about U.S. $2 billion. That oil amounts to generating 14.1 million tons of CO2 per year into the atmosphere, which adds to the global warming problems and all the extra future expenses that will entail, all for light that we do not even fully us
Hope you visit us soon and certainly bring your children so they can become involved in exploring our Universe with us...make it a family trip and have fun!
