April 14, 2009 - Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Another wonderful event Tuesday evening at the Royal BC Museum!
I rolled up about at about 8:15pm and many RASC members were already set up, and
there were several visitors enjoying the scopes and talking to the astronomers.
We had several telescopes from a classic C8 to home-builts to commercially made
beauties.
As dusk descended, the brighter stars began to appear and very soon after, the
showpiece of the night sky, Saturn. Tourists and passersby were curious about
why we were set up, then totally blown away by views of Saturn. Sirius was a
gorgeous sparkling diamond in the eyepiece. Mizar and Alcor produced more
delighted comments from our guests.
Then the fun really began.
As the last IMAX Victoria
showing of Cosmic Voyage ended (for the evening), the audience spilled out into the RBCM courtyard. Within about a minute, we were swamped by over 200 people eager
to see the night sky through our telescopes, patiently waiting 10-20 deep at
each of our telescopes And by the comments we received, they were not
disappointed. Oohs and Ahhs and exclamations of "No way....that's Saturn? Oh my
gosh!" could be heard everywhere in the warm evening air. It was amazing.
By 10:00pm or so most of our guests had had their fill of celestial photons and
drifted off and we began to pack up, although there were still a few visitors
remaining and some RASC members stayed to talk with them.
We had about 10-15 RASC members in attendance, and a half-dozen or so UVic and
HIA staff as well. Thanks, everyone!
Sherry Buttnor
| RASC IYA Sidewalk Astronomy after
Cosmic Voyage IMAX movie |
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| Photos of the event
taken by Garry Sedun |
