The Raleigh Astronomy Club was to host 3 venues for the 2014 Statewide Star Party as part of the NC Science Festival. Due to poor weather, events planned for Friday night were postponed to either Saturday night or later in the year.
One of the Saturday’s events was Howell Woodstock hosted at Howell Woods in Johnston County. The weather was pleasant and the Howell Woods staff says they had about 900 people come through from 1pm onward. During the afternoon, we had a steady stream of people come over for solar observing. Three white-light filtered scopes and two solar scopes were set up to show off the sun as it ducked in and out of cloud cover.
The club also provided indoor talks on Exoplanets, Black Holes and Weather on Mars, Jupiter & Saturn. The talks were well attended. The club also gave away 9 astrophotography prints graciously donated by RAC imagers; festival guests were delighted to receive them!
By late afternoon, early evening, the sky cleared out a good bit. We had additional RAC members show up to sky tour a crowd that we estimated to be 80-100 people. Crowd favorites were the ISS pass, Jupiter, the moon, Mars and M42. We received many questions from a very engaged crowd and had a good time showing off the night sky. By 10pm, most of the crowd had greatly thinned but a lucky few stayed around to 10:30 to watch one of Jupiter’s moons Callisto emerge from Jupiter’s shadow.
The other event was in hosted in Raleigh at Prairie Ridge, part of the NC Museum of Natural Science. The observing program started at 7:00PM. RAC had 12 scopes on hand for the event. The skies were less than perfect and we were plagued by high clouds for most of the evening. Despite the pesky clouds we were able to get in decent views of Earth’s Moon, Jupiter, Mars, the Pleiades (the Seven Sisters) and the Orion Nebula. The ISS pass overhead at 8:40PM was definitely an evening highlight and a real crowd pleaser.
The crowd was filled with exuberant people all very interested in astronomy. Starting at 7:00PM we had a steady stream of observers until about 10:30PM. A few of the astronomers took time to demonstrate usage of a Dobsonian scope and provided individualized training to members of the crowd on star hopping. Besides observing there were also science related crafts for kids and adults.
The overall count, according to museum staff, was about 200 people for the entire event.
Many thanks to all the club members that organized and volunteered for the events.
