Vacation 2005.5: Star Party
Jul. 17th, 2005 10:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve_primeYesterday morning I let ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fractal9091 sleep in a bit and ran a few errands (after AAA jump-started my dead car battery), picking up Scandal Takes a Holiday (our next unread Falco novel) at the library and replenishing our video supply. In the afternoon, we listened to his Phantom of the Opera cassette tapes (with a break in the middle so that he could perform surgery on the second tape, which broke). As you can see, our day was not without misfortunes, or in this case, "problem-solving opportunities." He started the Falco book first, and I took an afternoon nap.
In the evening we did something I'd long wanted to do: We went to one of the Eugene Astronomical Society's "Star Parties," on top of the College Hill Reservoir. Members set up big telescopes, point them at things, and invite others to take a look. This was great! We got really great views of the moon, especially craters along the line of transition from light to dark; we also saw the equatorial belts on Jupiter and the four Galilean moons.
We saw "fancier" things, too. Two people showed us the Ring Nebula. We looked at Alberio, a binary star; the Great Globular Cluster in Hercules; the Wild Duck Cluster (M11); the Lagoon Nebula in Sagittarius; and a really complicated star system, Mizor/Alcor, the second set of stars in from the end of the Big Dipper's handle. Why so complicated? One of the guys explained that there are actually five stars involved. First, Alcor and Mizor orbit around each other every 20 million years; these two can be distinguished with the naked eye. Then, Mizor consists of two "stars" that orbit around each other; we saw these two in a telescope. But then it turns out that each of Mizor's two stars is actually a double star as well, orbiting around each other every 20 days, but these can only be distinguished using spectrographs.
This guy had other interesting things to tell us as well, like that from Alpha Centauri the rest of the constellations look about the same but our sun makes another star in Cassiopeia. And that the four middle stars in the Big Dipper are about the same age and same distance from us, but the other two are much further. And that when we see the Milky Way in the sky, what we're actually seeing is the next arm over of our spiral galaxy.
Oh, also earlier in the evening we saw the International Space Station (orbiting the earth every 90 minutes) and some satellites. Conversations with the club members tend to be kind of strange, as they say interesting things, and we (the public) respond with, "wow," or "huh!" or "that's amazing!"
When we got back, we watched a few minutes of Super Atomic TV, which was apparently showing Battle of the Worlds, and a few minutes of The Triplets of Belleville, then some of four anime shows, including Inuyasha again (very different stuff happening than the other one I saw) and S-Cry-Ed.
fractal9091 sleep in a bit and ran a few errands (after AAA jump-started my dead car battery), picking up Scandal Takes a Holiday (our next unread Falco novel) at the library and replenishing our video supply. In the afternoon, we listened to his Phantom of the Opera cassette tapes (with a break in the middle so that he could perform surgery on the second tape, which broke). As you can see, our day was not without misfortunes, or in this case, "problem-solving opportunities." He started the Falco book first, and I took an afternoon nap.In the evening we did something I'd long wanted to do: We went to one of the Eugene Astronomical Society's "Star Parties," on top of the College Hill Reservoir. Members set up big telescopes, point them at things, and invite others to take a look. This was great! We got really great views of the moon, especially craters along the line of transition from light to dark; we also saw the equatorial belts on Jupiter and the four Galilean moons.
We saw "fancier" things, too. Two people showed us the Ring Nebula. We looked at Alberio, a binary star; the Great Globular Cluster in Hercules; the Wild Duck Cluster (M11); the Lagoon Nebula in Sagittarius; and a really complicated star system, Mizor/Alcor, the second set of stars in from the end of the Big Dipper's handle. Why so complicated? One of the guys explained that there are actually five stars involved. First, Alcor and Mizor orbit around each other every 20 million years; these two can be distinguished with the naked eye. Then, Mizor consists of two "stars" that orbit around each other; we saw these two in a telescope. But then it turns out that each of Mizor's two stars is actually a double star as well, orbiting around each other every 20 days, but these can only be distinguished using spectrographs.
This guy had other interesting things to tell us as well, like that from Alpha Centauri the rest of the constellations look about the same but our sun makes another star in Cassiopeia. And that the four middle stars in the Big Dipper are about the same age and same distance from us, but the other two are much further. And that when we see the Milky Way in the sky, what we're actually seeing is the next arm over of our spiral galaxy.
Oh, also earlier in the evening we saw the International Space Station (orbiting the earth every 90 minutes) and some satellites. Conversations with the club members tend to be kind of strange, as they say interesting things, and we (the public) respond with, "wow," or "huh!" or "that's amazing!"
When we got back, we watched a few minutes of Super Atomic TV, which was apparently showing Battle of the Worlds, and a few minutes of The Triplets of Belleville, then some of four anime shows, including Inuyasha again (very different stuff happening than the other one I saw) and S-Cry-Ed.