Telescope Reviews: Outreach right near downtown Chicago

For those of you unfamiliar with Chicago, the Adler Planetarium is on a man-made section of land that juts out into Lake Michigan. In the past few months I have joined the "Chicago Astronomer" Joe Guzman at Adler on several occasions where he and other occasional volunteers like me practice informal "sidewalk astronomy" - sharing some of the brighter objects in the night sky with anyone that passes by (a surprising number of people walk out that way at night for exercise or the view of the city).

We had a lot of extra traffic last night because the Adler had a program for scouts, so in addition to the volunteers at Adler with a few small scopes, Joe and I had our scopes set up as well. I didn't get a chance to take too many pictures, as we had well in excess of 200 adults and kids to which we attended throughout the evening!

A few highlights from when we had a couple slow moments - in the picture immediately below, my pier-mounted 5" f/9 refractor is to the left, and Joe's C11 is to the right:

Obviously, we are bathed in outdoor lighting in the area. But we view it as an opportunity - foot traffic doesn't exactly happen in dark-sky areas, at least not the kind that is wanted, in most cases! So when it is bright, and people can see faces and make safety-judgments in the city locations, we can invite curious onlookers to come over and share views of the sky. This sometimes leads to more in-depth conversations where we can discuss astronomy and light pollution, and sometimes just a simple, "Thank you!" and nothing more - and of course, everything in-between.

But I have to say, I enjoy this type of outreach immensely. People who are under the impression that "You can't see anything in the night sky from the city" suddenly have their preconceived notions up-ended, and a whole new world opens up to them. I hope this inspires more people to do this kind or city-sidewalk outreach.

A problem we are working on remedying is the HORRIBLE lighting that is in the area - note the large, bright light behind us (see pic below). It is a bit frustrating that the highlight astronomy location in Chicago has such poor lighting fixtures around it, but apparently the lighting is controlled by the Chicago Park District, not the planetarium itself. So we are working on getting some changes made - though it may take some time!

Attending to a few visitors in our area at a moment when things were a bit 'slow' during the evening - often there were lines of 5, 6 or 8 kids at each scope:

Temps were cool and brisk (fortunately I was nicely layered up and prepared for it!), and the breeze occasionally made it challenging with my "sometimes like a sail" long refractor, but people were overall very excited about the views of the nearly first quarter Moon and Jupiter that we offered throughout the night. The most memorable moment of the night was when three girls, probably around age 13 or 14 came up and were so excited to see Jupiter, there were literally jumping up and down from their excitement. Future scientists, I'd bet.