![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Observatory
Aug. 25th, 2008 11:54 amWellp, we went to the 'star party' at the Morgan County Observatory - it was very nice to be able to see the milky way and dozens of constellations with no problem. The night was pretty clear with only a few cloud wisps here and there, and after around 9:30 the air was relatively still. The first people to arrive (besides us) were from Baltimore - they'd come to Morgan County for the weekend to get away from the crowds. Several people commented that there was "nothing here". I tended to disagree - there were a lot of stars, there was a big open field surrounded by woods, there was an observatory dome, and there was a telescope. Definitely a lot more than "nothing"...
Finally the person who engineered and runs the whole thing showed up. He was kind of a character, and he talked about his efforts to convince various local politicians that funding the observatory was a good idea, and he talked about how some friend of Senator Byrd convinced the Naval Research Lab that donating the telescope to Morgan County and placing it near the elementary school was also a very good idea. He seemed about 45% finagler and 55% geek, which percentage varied with necessity.
He hosts training sessions in January for operating the telescope (finding things in the sky is the hardest part - this scope was built well before there were automatic GPS starfinders in telescopes). Throughout the evening, he managed to locate Jupiter, the Hercules Globular Cluster, Andromeda, the Ring Nebula, and the Albireo double star system. The telescope was not cooperating in allowing him to locate the Trifid Nebula in Lyra or epsilon Lyrae, a "double-double" star system in Lyra, though. Outside he used a green laser to point out various stars and constellations. It was remarkably effective at pointing out individual, barely visible stars. A number of us played a game where we matched constellations with their names, and there was a movie about the history of the observatory.
The dome itself is kind of an amazing piece of work. He would pull a lever and the whole roof would begin to rotate (with a rather startlingly thunderous noise) until it came to rest at a certain coordinate. Then another lever would rotate the scope into position. After that was the hard part of trying to pinpoint the second of arc where something was located at a given moment in the earth's rotation. Once it was located, the earth tracker would be activated to correct for the earth's rotation.
It was rather fun and disturbing to see how this thing was actually allowed its existence through the geekery/finaglery and perseverance of one person. I may join to support them. I'm not sure if I want to let myself in for becoming an operator. I remember those nights in January trying to find some elusive object with the Celestron 8s. I was no good at it whatsoever (I need the auto-GPS kind of telescope, sadly).
Finally the person who engineered and runs the whole thing showed up. He was kind of a character, and he talked about his efforts to convince various local politicians that funding the observatory was a good idea, and he talked about how some friend of Senator Byrd convinced the Naval Research Lab that donating the telescope to Morgan County and placing it near the elementary school was also a very good idea. He seemed about 45% finagler and 55% geek, which percentage varied with necessity.
He hosts training sessions in January for operating the telescope (finding things in the sky is the hardest part - this scope was built well before there were automatic GPS starfinders in telescopes). Throughout the evening, he managed to locate Jupiter, the Hercules Globular Cluster, Andromeda, the Ring Nebula, and the Albireo double star system. The telescope was not cooperating in allowing him to locate the Trifid Nebula in Lyra or epsilon Lyrae, a "double-double" star system in Lyra, though. Outside he used a green laser to point out various stars and constellations. It was remarkably effective at pointing out individual, barely visible stars. A number of us played a game where we matched constellations with their names, and there was a movie about the history of the observatory.
The dome itself is kind of an amazing piece of work. He would pull a lever and the whole roof would begin to rotate (with a rather startlingly thunderous noise) until it came to rest at a certain coordinate. Then another lever would rotate the scope into position. After that was the hard part of trying to pinpoint the second of arc where something was located at a given moment in the earth's rotation. Once it was located, the earth tracker would be activated to correct for the earth's rotation.
It was rather fun and disturbing to see how this thing was actually allowed its existence through the geekery/finaglery and perseverance of one person. I may join to support them. I'm not sure if I want to let myself in for becoming an operator. I remember those nights in January trying to find some elusive object with the Celestron 8s. I was no good at it whatsoever (I need the auto-GPS kind of telescope, sadly).