Alex Bergemann's Boy Scout Troop at Seagrave
by Dave Huestis & Steve Siok
Report submitted by Dave Huestis
Alex’s scout troop spent the weekend at Seagrave (Oct. 26/27). On the Friday night they observed under a beautiful clear sky. On Saturday Bob Forgiel was scheduled to run a program so a small contingent of scouts could earn their astronomy merit badge. Bob was unable to attend due to truck problems, so Conrad Cardano stepped in and covered the required material.
I was going to volunteer that night to help out, but it was cloudy all day and the clouds prevented any observing on Saturday night. As a contingency I had arranged to show two videos. One is titled The Life and Death of a Star. This 50 minute program shows how stars are born out of contracting dust clouds, and once the condensing proto-star’s core gets hot enough, nuclear fusion begins and a star is born. The video goes on to explain the variety of star sizes and temperatures, and talks about how long various stars live, and then how they die.
The second video was about solar activity, but we skipped ahead to a portion of the program that talked about the affects of flares and coronal mass ejections on the near-Earth environment, highlighting the beautiful northern lights.
Several times during the showing of the videos the scouts were distracted by the scurrying of the meeting hall’s resident mouse population.
Report submitted by Steve Siok
Some of you may remember that this spring, Alex’s scout troop did Skyscrapers a great service by helping to clear away a lot of the trees and shrubs cut down in the land to our North and East. The boys labored for 4 or five hours and we rewarded them with a cookout that afternoon. However we promised them that they could have an observing session in the future. This happened on October 26. Alex and seven other scouts as well as parents and siblings came to Seagrave to get a view of the night sky. Steve , Conrad and Jim opened the 12” and 16” Meades. Four scouts went to each rolloff and were treated to about 2 hours of clear skies. Because we took advantage of the GOTO nature of these two instruments we showed the scouts about a dozen different objects. Skies remained clear throughout the time and they got a great idea of the different types of objects visible in our instruments.
