Sharing The Sky Web Log 13—Star Night

On the cool, beautiful afternoon and evening of Saturday, April 24, from 3 to 10 pm, Sharing the Sky conducted its thirteenth annual Star Night. Since a storm had just passed through, the weather was absolutely perfect with an afternoon high in the 70s. For the first few hours we had solar telescopes set up so that people could examine several small prominences around the girth of the Sun,  During this time I was rather surprised that a team from KMSB, Channel 11, a local Tucson station, came over to interview me.  The interview went well, and provided me with an opportunity to share my ideas about our foundation and its goals with a wide public audience.  Earlier, Jimmy Stewart of KVOA, Channel 4 in Tucson, devoted almost a minute of air time to promote our event, and a few days earlier, during my monthly conversation with Bill Buckmaster on our local PBS outlet we chatted about Star Night for several minutes.

Six autoscopes

When things were going well observationally some 15 years ago, I could boast of one visual telescope with a good wide-field eyepiece. That was then. When things are going well observationally now, I have 8 telescopes going at once. From a simple visual program called CN3 that began on December 17, 1965, the effort has expanded. Here’s an overview of its parts:

As the Hudson river flowers towards the south from scenic Lake George at the south end of the Adirondacks, its waters head toward New York City. By the time they pass the Croton Harmon train station north of New York City, they have pretty much stopped flowing, and the river is an estuary. On the west bank of this beautiful body of water lies the Tarrytown campus of Mercy College. A non-sectarian undergraduate institution devoted to planting the seeds of higher education in the minds of its students, Mercy strives to provide its students with a good traditional liberal arts education either on one of its several campuses, or even online. It is in this environment that I have been invited to launch my post-Ph.D. career. I have designed a course that will discover relations between the between the night sky and the works on English Literature I love so dearly.