Starry Night

We have been having a lot of fun checking out the Night Sky. I was in charge of organizing Hot Starry Night for the Children's Museum. It was great fun!!! Thank goodness for all the help I received from all the Pennypickle staff. Our Astronomers Wes and Don and Jordan we amazing. We learned a lot from those gentlemen in just a few hours. We saw a spectacular satellite and learned how to watch for them. The satellite came out of the west and all of sudden there was a flash. Don told us that was the sun reflecting off the solar panels. (It was 8:30 at night and dark out!!)The night sky is Amazing!!! There was Jupiter and it's Galilean moons. Our moon was full and it was amazing the way some of the visitors took pictures of it through the eyepiece of the telescope. We saw deep space sights like globular clusters and a galaxy or two. So the next evening Gordon took what he learned and we found some pretty good stuff with our little telescope...Wild Duck Cluster..M13 Galaxy...and the moon was still a sight to see! Gordon took the picture with our telescope camera. We are having Fun now!!!

Seeing Jupiter

We went to the Southern California Astronomy Expedition for Gordon's birthday. We went two Saturdays..One night had a Star Party and the keynote speaker was from SETI (My favorite organization) It was great looking through the "BIG" telescopes. And we realized that our little one really does pretty good. The second Saturday gave us a lot of information. I use the term "Us" loosely. I enjoyed all of it but a lot of it went way over my head...Gordon was able to absorb a lot of it. The results will be forthcoming with lots of pictures. The one I'm posting today is the first one he took since learning soooo much. It seems the camera was a little out of focus, because when we looked through the telescope we could see the blueish bands, but this picture is pretty good and you can see three of the moons! More to follow...maybe even some pictures of the sun!!!