President’s Message
Greetings:
This year was the first full year of back to normal events since before the pandemic. We had many accomplishments. Over the summer the membership went to 100 members. We had more public events than the past few years, and new organizations requesting stargazing events. We’ve had more public events with 200+ in attendance than ever before. We had a successful Connecticut Star Party. The library program has expanded tremendously with presentations for the upcoming eclipse and requests for star parties. Public schools are now requesting presentations and star party events.
I want to thank Jim Mazur and Laurie Averill for leading the library event and library scope program. Thank you to everyone that helped out with public events. You did a fantastic job. CSP would not have been such a success without the volunteers.
With 2023 on the books we now start 2024 and our 87th year.
Best regards and clear skies.
Greg Barker
Recent Public Observing Events
North Branford Libraries Family Astronomy Night, Friday October 13
At the start time of 7pm there were a few stars peaking out and the crowd was beginning to arrive. Before I knew it, we had a very large crowd with lines at every scope. I had taken my Telrad off earlier in the day to clean it so I wasn’t prepared at start time. I was able to find Altair and stayed there until someone moved the scope. I had a long line so I just found a pretty orange star and stayed on that for a while. Other scopes were on Saturn and Albireo and other deep sky objects. There were a fair number of children at an age that was just a little too young to be able to see through the scopes. Some of them were able to and others just couldn’t get it. When the crowd died down, I was able to find Jupiter, Andromeda and the ET Cluster. You could see all 4 moons of Jupiter and the first 2 were very close to the planet. I had to verify this with someone else to make sure I just wasn’t seeing double. The event was mostly over by 8:30 because most of the participants were families with young children.
Lyman Orchards Astronomy Night, Saturday November 11
Wow. I can’t remember the last time we had a crowd like this. There had to be over 200 people. Most were adults but there was a fair share of children. Every scope had a line of over 20 people throughout the entire night. The bigger scopes had bigger lines, but we all had long lines. I was a bit separated from the main group because of a light beam crossing the observing area, but I was told that the scopes were on Saturn, Jupiter, the Pleiades, the Perseus Double Cluster, and other objects. There were about 8 scopes for people to look through. Most of us stayed on the same object through most of the night. I moved to some other objects after most of the crowd had died down. All of the people were very excited to see the planets and moons up close. This was an excellent site. We were set up on a hill and the views were awesome. Lyman didn’t have any lights but there was the one street light that we had to avoid. Did I mention that it was a very cold night? It has been a long time since I had ice on my equipment as I was packing up. The crowd was bundled up and many sat in lawn chairs just looking at the dark sky. I think Lyman will be asking us back.
Young’s Park, Saturday November 18
This was our last public stargazing event for this year. There were 9 scopes total, which is an impressive number. Our visitors came throughout the night so we were able to spend time with each one and show many different objects in the sky. It seemed that most of the people who stopped by had never been to one of our events before. It was good to show the planets to so many new people who had never looked through a scope. It was very cold and our visitors left so we packed up and were on our way a little early. It was nice to end the year on a good note.