Obama and friends: Celebrating the Year of Astronomy in Style.
Obama Star Party!
With Bonus Real Stars.
"The President and First Lady host NASA astronauts, area middle schoolers, and innovators in the field of astronomy for a night of fun, learning, and stargazing on the South Lawn. October 7, 2009."
John Grunsfeld setting up the telescopes.
Ok, that might work...
Hope they turned those bloody lights down though...
click to embiggen - from Celestron Images
Brought in two teen amateur astronomers - Caroline Moore, supernova hunter; and Maura's student from Green Bank - Lucas Bolyard R-RAT catcher.
Now, we just need some follow through.
Sounds like any decision on NASA is delayed till next month at least.
NYT The Caucus post on the event
Huff Po has a nice photo slide show of the event - White House has not put their slide show up yet.
I would be surprised if that photo is in fact representative of what they saw from the lawn, since they are inside city limits and the column of hot air rising hurts the seeing.
It should be noted that the CPC 1100XLT is the top-of-line Celestron goto telescope, costing around $3K without extras (budget at least $4K to include a minimum set). Also, epsilon Lyrae is a fairly challenging target, not so much for finding but for splitting. The two pairs of inner doubles subtend a mere 2.3"/2.6" of arc, so both your optics and the "seeing" (steadiness and clarity of the atmosphere above you) have to be pretty good. As must your eyes. My 8" Celestron is in need of collimation and has rather bad coma, so does not split them as well as my 6" Konus refractor. Anything smaller than 6" needs to be most excellent. Typically, it takes a Takahashi ($7K) or Televue ($2K) 3". Less than 3" aperture I think the diffraction limits start coming into play so no quality will help. The <$300 scopes you find in Target or Costco have no chance, unless you are really lucky with your sample of production quality.
The 1100XLT of course would have no problem caused by its optics. I want one.
When I was a grad student at UVa, we used to use the 6" Alvan Clark refractor from 1898 to observe epsilon Lyrae, and that telescope could split both doubles with ease.
Those bellmakers sure could grind lenses.
My very first telescope experience was at the University of London Mill Hill Observatory in 1963. I and a couple of friends got left behind the tour group in the Fry Telescope dome for the night, unsupervised. I have zero recollection of how that came about, although to be fair I was the president of the photographic society and was considered OK with sensitive equipment. Jupiter was up and this beautiful telescope had him hanging right in front of us, subtending a good apparent 30 degrees. Unforgettable. Soured all subsequent telescopes for me, so it was a good 40 years till I could afford something even only vaguely close to that.
The Fry is an 8" f/15 German Equatorial refractor built in 1862, with weight driven clockwork RA drive, and no Dec drive. Exquisitely balanced and aligned. Yes, they really knew how to build them back then.
http://www.ulo.ucl.ac.uk/telescopes/fry/