Tours of the Observatory June 23, 2008
Posted by jcconwell in Astronomy, IYA 2009, Observatory.Tags: Add new tag, EIU, Observatory
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One of the missions of the observatory is our open houses. We are 180 south of Chicago and about 65% of our students are from that region. Many have never looked through any telescope, let alone one as big as our 16″ scope.
Some have never seen a star….
The light pollution is so bad they couldn’t. Now it’s not exactly high desert out here, or as I say “places where you grow corn are not the best places to grow telescopes”, but sometimes you have to bring the observatories to the people were they live. That’s a central roll for small observatories like the ones at Eastern. This afternoon I’ll have the board of trustees for EIU, tonight we’ll have my physics class, at the end of this week I’ll have the monthly open house for the general public. The we’ll switch out the eyepiece put in the spectrograph and see if we can get our first spectra of Epsilon Aurigae. We hope to bring in more than 2000 people to the observatory next year during the Interational Year of Astronomy.
