Last night, Brock, Steve and I had an interesting time at the Keystone College Observatory. It's located north of La Plume, which is past Scranton - so almost an hour's drive away. The evening program was hosted by the Lackawanna Astronomical Society. Professor Thomas Cupillari, after whom the observatory is named, greeted us and manned one of the telescopes after night fell. We arrived in plenty of time to look around, then listened to a presentation mostly about telescopes.
Then, by far the best part..... looking at the stars! Well, technically, some planets and some stars. We had a perfectly clear night, and it was gorgeous to look up at the heavens. We had the chance to look through four different telescopes, and got to see:
Venus (extremely bright) ............... Mars (definitely looked reddish) .... Saturn (through 2 different telescopes, and it was absolutely spectacular since the rings were completely visible) ............ a binary star system ........... a trinary star system ........... some star clusters........... a nebula ........... a satellite passing by ........... Polaris (the North Star) ........... numerous constellations, although it was hard to recognize them. We did easily make out the Big Dipper and Orion's Belt. It was fun to hear names from Greek myths such as Andromeda and Perseus (constellations) and Io (one of Jupiter's moons). I thought it was amazing to watch one star actually "twinkling". We'll definitely go back again!
Three of the telescope's were in buildings, and one smaller one was placed on the ground. With encouragement from one of the Society members, you Brock had a few chances to move that telescope into position before looking up at another beautiful sight. This morning you said again that you had a wonderful time - I'm so glad. And thank you for helping me pick out this pretty picture of Saturn:
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