Telescope Reviews: 100 Telescopes In The Park report

Hello everyone,

Some of you may have heard of our "100 Telescopes In The Park" event over the past few months. It happened last weekend and here's the report I sent to all our volunteers after it was all over:

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Hello Friends,

First of all, THANK YOU TO EVERYONE who participated in 100 Telescopes In The Park. Without volunteer help, this event could not have been conceived, much less brought about! It was a humbling experience to be amongst so many learned and generous friends.

For those who were unable to attend, and also to fulfill a need to document the event, here is a report from the eyes of this reporter and the few volunteers with whom I was able to confer after a very busy eight hours on-site. To make a long story short, it was a massive success! But it didn't appear to start out that way.

Friday night was rain, rain, rain; however, we still had about a dozen volunteers show up and help six people who brought in their telescopes for the clinic -- all done under the rain canopies! People packed up and were out of there by 7:30pm since it kept raining but visitors stopped coming.

Saturday was completely different. There was no rain, and by the time the telescope clinic started at 6:00pm the sky was partly cloudy and the first quarter Moon was available. As darkness fell we had more than 60 telescopes set up, and guests streaming in nonstop. Todd Dezeeuw of the Sampson Planetarium showed people how to make "star wheels" out of old CDs. A journalism grad student from Chicago drove up with her husband to write a story on the event, and then they retreived their own telescope from their car to join in the festivities! Vivian Hoette from Yerkes Observatory spent the entire night helping people put together their very own Galileoscopes. By the end of the evening, there were nine very happy families who completed their instruments, one at a time.

The Moon and Jupiter were the main sky attractions, with Io casting a shadow on the Jovian disk for much of the evening -- a perfect lead-in to the IYA2009 story. People also used the Starlight Scavenger Hunt cards to prompt a little deeper exploration of the sky as their curiosity desired. Planetary nebula, star clusters and even galaxies became objects of fascination among the crowds.

By the time we wound things down at 11pm, some estimates put us at upwards of a thousand people between volunteers and attendees throughout the evening. At least two dozen telescopes were brought in for the telescope clinic, and probably more. We actually did have 100 telescopes officially tagged on the field that evening; fittingly, the last one brought onto the field was a Galileoscope assembled earlier in the evening.

We had volunteers from 12 different astronomical organizations participate in this event. Not only did we have a lot of fun doing the outreach, but I believe we also learned a great deal from each other. One of the goals of IYA2009 is "facilitate new networks and strengthen existing ones" and this event fulfilled that in conjuction with the more obvious IYA2009 goals releated to public outreach and education.

To make it easy to share photos, a group called Wisconsin Astronomy has been established on the free photo sharing site known as Flickr. This is the same photo sharing service used by IYA2009 and thus photos submitted to the Wisconsin Astronomy group can also be attached to the official IYA2009 photostream. Please post any photos you can! A direct link is http://www.flickr.com/groups/wisconsinastronomy/. I would also like to link some of these photos on a scrapbook section of the Wisconsin Astronomy website during a future update.

Once again, thank you for your support of 100 Telescopes In The Park!

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-Astrosetz
www.astrosetz.com