Today was the day for Pucketts Mill solar event and the weather did cooperate The students learned how we get the energy from the sun and in what forms this comes. They learned about how the magnetic field shields us from a lot of bad emissions and how Solarstorms contribute to be able to see Northern Lights, and they also detected the UV light that changed the color of their beads. They observed the sun through H-alpha filtered scopes and whitelight and learned why sunspots look dark even though they are 6000 degrees. Some movies gave a good understanding of what happens on and in the sun. The last group also got to see Venus in bright daylight and explained why it looks like half of moon. Thanks to Mandy Collins the teacher who invited us and who reinforced what the students learned like she was part of our team Thanks Mrs. Collins. The students loved it.
Click on the picture below to see more in the picture gallery.

Sunspots, proms, flying arrows & flames – what a day! Frank Garner & Marie Lott led a memorable and fun event on March 26th on Jon Wood Field with 60 college students from Berkeley and Arkansas. Who knew that college students would travel cross-country to spend their spring break at Charlie Elliott? Adding to the fun was the fact that we shared the field with an archery activity, complete with moving targets! Frank decided wisely that it would be safer to move the telescopes to be behind the shooters instead of down range. To top off the afternoon, the woods around the astronomy field were set on fire as part of a “controlled burn” before the last group of students. Wow! We lost the view of a pretty crescent Venus and a daytime moon in the smoke, but no one seemed to mind. Another glorious day on Jon Wood Field.

We reached out to a number of families who were camping out at the Crooket Pines Farm in Eatonton. The skies were cloudy at first, but they gave way to some thin high cirrus clous and we were able to show them Jupiter and its moons, orion and the orion nebula and a number of clusters. They also liked the double Mizar and learned how to find North with the stars. They really enjoyed learning about the Universe and even the little girl, who was asked what she saw after looking at Jupiter, said “I saw a planet ”

Thursday afternoon, Frank and Theo went to Oxford College. We were invited by Jim Honeycut to bring Solar to the students. After a presentation about the sun using some of our tools, the astronomy class took their time to observe the sun in great detail through visible light and H-alpha telescopes. They made some nice drawings of what they saw and a few of them actually snapped an image if the Sun with their cell phones through the telescopes. We really did appreciate the session with some good questions and a lot of attention and at the end everyone was able to see how we image the sun as we actually ran some avis .

Because of the cloudy weather the observing at the Jon Wood Field had to cancelled and instead, we gave some inside presentations. The highschool students took a flight through the Solar System and learned a lot about gravey on different space objects and why it is dangerous to run fast on the moon Deimos. They learned about how we study our neighbor Mars and what it takes to take Curiosity from Earth to Mars. A variety of other topics made this a well received session despite the clouds.

We went for two days to Trip Elementary in Grayson and exposed the 4th graders a little more to astronomy, space, and space exploration. They learned inside more about astronomical concepts, the solar system and the universe, and outside they learned a lot about our solar system. They were very surprised to find out through our relative size activity, how small earth really is and how far away we are from the Sun. They also could take a look at the sun and on the second day, they even observed Venus in midday!! Thanks Frank for adding this to their program. Thanks to Jon Edwards, Frank Garner and Theo Ramakers for being there for these students. Please click the image below to go to the gallery and see the students in the activities.

We had a great time at Summerour Middle School in Norcross, where Valorie Whalen, Marie Lott, David Whalen, Charlie Cottingham, Frank Garner and Theo Ramakers showed about 100 students and their parents with 6 telescopes the beauty of the night sky including Jupiter with a transit of Io, the Orion Nebula, the Pleiades and not to forget our Moon. Inside the visitors learned more about NASA’s MSL mission and how Curiosity navigates on the red planet and what the night sky looked like that evening. A great and very rewarding evening for all of us. Thanks to Mrs Marjorie Veazey from Summerour and those who helped at this event.

We have seen a good number of images taken in the last month, but David Whalen has been very persistent in trying to get better with imaging Jupiter. Last Saturday the seeing was great and David captured his best Jupiter so far. With seeing as bad as it has been for months, this was very rewarding for David. The image was taken with his C1100, a DMK41AU02AS, 500 frames captured with ICapture and stacked and processed in Registax6. Very nice job David!!!

CEA had its yearly NASA/NSN Award Presentation as part of the March Potluck Dinner Meeting.
In 2013, 20 Members did participate in CEA’s outreach and our statistics are great:
Participating Members 20
Total Events 80
Public facing members 226
Volunteer hours 1,181
Miles Driven to Events 13,818
Reached out to 18,350 individuals

The following is a list of individuals who earned their NASA/NSN Award Pin and the number of events each member logged. One needs to participate in at least 5 events to qualify for the award and pin:
Dominik Giacobbe 5
Marilyn Edwards 5
Jon Edwards 6
Jack Fitzmier 6
Tim Lott 6
Jim Lancaster 8
John Towne 16
Marie Lott 23
Steve Siedentop 23
Frank Garner 56
Theo Ramakers 67

The following members did participate in less than 5 events:
Bob Jacoby, Jeff Rebitzke, Steve Phillips, Kyle Cavin, Bruce Wengryn, Valerie and David Whalen, and Annette and Pierre Michel.

A special award went to Maria Zorka, Morgan Cline and Paul Blackney for their generous donations to our outreach program in 2013.

Thanks to everyone who helped in bringing astronomy a little closer to so many people.
Clear Skies,
Theo Ramakers,
CEA Outreach Coordinator

53 Members and guests attended a great March Potluck dinner meeting. After some opening remarks by Steve Siedentop, CEA’s Director, Jack Fitzmier gave a short book review of Jim Sowell’s book “The Naked Eye Sky” which was donated by the Camera Bug. A repeat presentation of the “Big-O” 16″ telescope reconstruction project was given by Larry Owens. A tremedous effort! Thanks Larry for getting this scope back in use for our CEA members and visitors! Theo Ramakers followed with a short presentation to remind recent members who Jon Wood was, how he inspired so many, and how basically he was responsible for the large outreach efforts in the Atlanta area. Next was the NSN award presentation for those who participated in CEA’s outreach in 2013 (See seperate post), and those who participated in 5 or more events also received the NSN Keppler Dark field Pin. Theo announced the last donation to CEA by Larry Owens: a 10″ Meade LX50. This scope will come in very handy in our outreach at the field. John Towne followed with his always interesting and well prepared “What’s Up” for March. After the meeting it went to the Jon Wood Field for the dedication ceremony of the new CEA Scope Building and the revealing of the 16″ scopes. Members and guests were in awe about the crisp image the scope gave of Jupiter and M42 and Larry and Theo made the “First Light image of the scope at the Jon Wood Field.