Southern California Desert Video Astronomers
We were the late part of the full, day long, event that started with a space day celebration for kids at the Hi Desert Nature Museum.
Decorated with scenes from outer space, the volunteers and staff of the museum outdid themselves with a great job of bringing the thrills of what deep space is all about. From aliens to lunar rovers, the museum was transformed into a galactic fantasy land from outer space!
The official opener for the event began with the annual meeting of the Western Astronomical League. Then, speakers, Ray Yeager, Dennis Mammana, Wally Pacholka, David Levy, Orv Hunter, Jerry Mattos and Bill Souder gave the audience their interesting presentations on subjects they know and love to share with others.
Participating groups who supported the event included the Andromeda Society, The Sky's the Limit Observatory and Nature Center, the Town of Yucca Valley, Southern California Edison, and the Hi Desert Nature museum. Wally Pacholka had a display of his astro photos for sale and all of the groups had tables displaying the information explaining their goals and achievements relating to astronomy and the night skies. Our group did the astronomy.
Wally Pacholka displaying his award.
After a well stocked raffle, the lovely belly dancing troupe, "The Jewels of the Desert", shook up the evening to applause and delight of the overflow audience. They were the highlight of the social reception that was trimmed with a wonderful spread of food and drink.
Lynne Richardson, director of the Hi Desert Nature Museum, the presenters of the event, and Stephanie Ritter, the manager of the museum, then directed the crowd outside to where we (SCDVA) were set up for an evening of star gazing from behind the Yucca Valley Civic Center.
Several astronomers joined in with us and there were a total of five Mallincam's running and providing images to the single screen projection setup, we were using.
Ric Knudsen gave the crowd a tour of the night sky and narrated the show as objects hit the silver screen.
Visual viewing was provided through the famous Stephen O'Meara Tele Vue Genesis and the prototype 13mm Nagler eyepiece that were bringing crisp views of Jupiter and other objects.
Dan from San Diego brought his dazzling William Optics 110 for all to look through and John Fraser used his C11 for imaging but also brought his giant Vixen binoculars and stunned the viewers.
Rick Heistand imaged the difficult to see, Comet Christian, with his big 12 inch SCT as well as other deep sky objects.
Paul had his new 22 inch monster killer Dobsonian sucking in the faintest objects, while I had my usual dueling Nexstar 11's hunting for crowd pleasing views.
We were very fortunate for being assisted by Sue, Deb and Valeree who make all of the background stuff work when we couldn't pay attention to anything other than the alignment of our wayward telescopes.
Sincere thanks goes to these important members of our team for the selfless work they bring to the effort of our outreach attempts.
Two things made the event special. First was the great audience and easy going social side of what turned out to be a nice get-together, and the second was the fact that the town turned down much of the unnecessary night lighting that is the dread of all who love the night sky. Bravo! Still, we were quite hampered by the light dome above us.
By the time everyone left and we were packing up, the Milky Way was reasonably visible from the down town location and that was surprisingly nice!
Thanks to everyone for making it fun!
Photo by D.O.
Lynne Richardson of the Hi-Desert Nature Museum at the helm, greeting visitors to a space adventure.
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Photo by D.O.
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Photo by D.O.
Jerry Mattos representing The Sky's The Limit
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Orv "The Orion Hunter" Preparing for his presentation on Jupiter.
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The Andromeda Society's First Lady of Astronomy,
Mary Firth with Tom
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