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In this April letter I feel compelled
to highlight some of my own recent experiences with
the club and to share with you my view of it's impact
on our local community and the people in it, and
on other astronomy enthusiasts in other parts of
the country and even the rest of the world.
So much has happened in March already
- and as I write this letter - I still have nearly
half the month left. Time flies when you are having
fun!
Let's start with the March OCA
meeting. Apart from a fantastic what's up presentation
by Chris Butler - and a superb speaker from Sky
& Telescope in the form of their Editor-in-chief
Rick Fienberg - we also had the conclusion of the
Grand Raffle. What an exciting time we had.
If you stuck around for the Raffle
drawing you will know that all the prizes went to
various lucky attendees - with just one ending up
going to a person who was not present at the meeting
(remember you did not have to be present to win).
The grand prize, donated by AstronomyQuest of Irvine,
of the Celestron 80GT Computerized telescope ended
up going to a very happy OCA member. I am sure that
now our weather has cleared up that telescope has
already seen "First Light".
Talking of first light - I wanted
to share with you another experience which I took
part in at the last weekend. I happened to be invited
out to help with an Outreach at Anza for a group
of around 20 middle school children from Stephen
White Middle school. This group is working through
a program sponsored by Motorola which is run by
Wayne C Johnson (not our Mr Galaxy - but nevertheless
a very dedicated teacher of this science). This
program involves the students giving up two Saturdays
every month to go through a thorough introduction
to this science. It gives me extreme pleasure to
be able to share what I know and have learned about
astronomy with young inquisitive minds. We started
out looking at planets and gradually got further
away stopping off at Open Clusters (M41), The Orion
Nebula, M1 - the crab nebula, M3, and then some
galaxies in Leo and then Virgo. The students soaked
up every morsel of information that I could tell
them about these wonderful objects.
Below is a photograph of the new
Public area on the football field - showing the
new pads with electricity. So - the first to experience
this were the children and parents and sponsors
of this outreach group.
Onto my "First Light" link. There is so
much going on at Anza - those of you who have not
been for a while are in for a treat when you next
visit (hopefully you already have attended the Anza
Messier Marathon on March 24th). Russell Sipe has
been working with a number of dedicated club members
on the completion of his new "StarCruiser"
observatory. The 16.25" telescope is still
being worked on elsewhere - however the motorized
dome is now all but complete. Russell very kindly
invited many of us - including the young budding
astronomers of the Stephen White Middle School to
experience the "First Naked-Eye Light"
for his observatory dome. It was a great moment
as Russell invited around 20 of us to squeeze into
his dome and to be introduced to the concept of
what it means to be among the first to experience
such an event. Russells observatory is set to become
a major addition to the research that will be performed
alongside the Kuhn Telescope by OCA Members Myke
Collins and Minor White. Below is a photo of the
dome and some of the members who contributed their
muscle to the effort. I am sure that Russell will
want to write a full article on his experiences.
In addition to the new Dome up
on our "Observatory Hill" - you will also
see new developments out at the Members Observatories
area. Here our own Board Member and "Volunteer
Extraordinaire", Gary Schones, has been grading
some of the land to allow the development of two
further permanent observatories - one for himself
- and another for OCA Member (and Pad Electrician)
Vance Tyree.
March was also the time that another
great event happened which I would be very remiss
in not mentioning. On March 10th we had a truly
remarkable club event. AstroImage 2001 was attended
by around 125 participants and another 10 or so
active volunteers. This I am told is one of the
best attendance's of all times. I know that Sirius
Astronomer editor Chris McGill will be developing
a great summary of the meeting both for publication
in our newsletter and for our website with help
from Dave Kodama - so look out for this. However
there are already video archives of every single
presentation up on the web site right now for you
to enjoy. Which brings me onto my other area of
how the club can impact an even wider community
than we could have imagined a year ago. This year
- with help from my own company - marchFIRST - and
my wife - Anna Kennedy, we managed to deliver the
conference live to 20 remote participants who were
based in various parts of the USA, Canada and even
Australia. In several cases the stream was being
displayed on a large-screen projector for up to
10 people. Our remote attendees probably amounted
to up to 35 people. This brings the total up to
around 160 attendees of AstroImage 2001.
I thought I would share with you
some of the accolades we received from these remote
viewers.
Dear Liam and OCA associates,
I want to thank you and all of
the organizers of AstroImage 2001 for providing
such an excellent video feed to us at UW-Whitewater.
With the exception of a very few hiccups, requiring
restarts of the feed, I had no difficulty in providing
my students and local amateurs with an excellent
program in one of Upham Hall's multimedia classrooms.
I hope you will be able to archive
some, if not all, of the presentations given at
this year's conference. If you can, they will be
excellent teaching tools for my future classes.
Thanks again for a high-quality
effort, and I hope Orange County Astronomers will
continue this excellent service -- even if it may
be only available "after the fact".
The University of Wisconsin-Whitewater's
College of Letters and Sciences and its Department
of Physics look forward to hosting a video feed
of the next AstroImage conference.
Paul Rybski
Paul M. Rybski, Ph.D., Associate Professor
Chair, Dept. of Physics, and
Director, Whitewater Observatory
University of WI-Whitewater
Whitewater, WI 53190-1790
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Hey Liam,
I can't express my gratitude appropriately. This
is an unbelievably valuable resource. Thank you!!!
It was a great conference. The video feed brings
me content that I otherwise would have a rare chance
to view. Orange County Astronomers has much to be
proud of. Your website has become resource number
one for my future astronomy club meetings. The What's
Up presentations are outstanding. Please let me
know what my astronomy club and I can do to support
you efforts in making this high quality content
available.
Jeff Ball
Astrophotography
www.astro-photography.com
Ohio Valley Astronomical Society
http://webpages.marshall.edu/~ball3/ovas.html
It remains for me to thank the
organizers of the AstroImage event for making such
a conference so valuable to our members, visiting
clubs,and enthusiasts around the world. Well Done!
"every day we are connecting ever more photons
of light from distant galaxies to the hearts, minds
and imaginations of our members and others in our
community."
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