NEAIC and NEAF

The imaging conference (NEAIC) and the Telescope Show (NEAF) are over for this year. The last few days have been pretty hectic and I’m just now catching up.

On Friday, I attended a spectroscopy workshop led by Olivier Thizy where he walked us through the process of using a spectrum taken with a diffraction grating in front of a Canon 350D (Digital Rebel XT) which we then used to measure the rotational speed of Saturn. What a cool application using completely off-the-shelf components.

For NEAF itself, Maria and I worked in the children’s area this year both days. On Saturday we helped the children build 3-D models of the constellation Orion and on Sunday we built models of the Big Dipper. Both events worked out well and were well attended with about 25 models built during the two days. We spent a little time which (almost?) every child helping them to see the constellation then talking about how the stars are really at different distances.

I did come back with a couple of new "toys." Apart from the new Sun T-shirt from Inifi-Tees (appropriate dress for the PS 102 lesson on the sun), I also came back with a couple of tektites (melted material ejected from a meteor crater), a couple of "astro-blasters" designed to show how momentum transfer can result in humongous explosions in supernova, a SolarScope™ suitable for group viewing of the Sun’s disk in white light (pity we’re close to the sunspot minimum right now), and an AstroTrac™ for taking long-exposure wide-field images with just my DSLR.

But now its back to work. There’s still a month left for the PS 102 Astronomy Club and I have plenty to do for that.