[Friends_of_SSASTROS] Sidewalk Astronomy Kickoff @ SLH

[Mike McCabe]

Greetings Members and Friends of the SSAS,
Last night, Saturday the 15th of June, we finally got the Scituate Lighthouse outreach series under way for the 2024 season. It's been a while in coming, and for more than one reason. First of all there was the rather abysmal weather that we had to contend with through late April and much of May, and then there's the dearth of targets that make a bright site like the sidewalk at SLH worth setting up at.
The weather seems to have finally broken, but the target situation remains the same. At a place like Scituate Harbor you need bright things like the Moon and the planets to impress the average patron's eyes, and with the planets not making decent evening apparitions until much later this year we're basically down to the Moon. So for the foreseeable future we've decided that we'd break from the 'clear Friday nights' protocol and go with a more spontaneous approach of any clear night when the sky is clear and the Moon is well placed. Last night was one of those.

We had an excellent turnout last night, with over a half-dozen scopes set up and maybe a dozen club members present, plus a guest astronomer, Rose Amaral from the Astronomical Society of Southern New England.

For the early part of the evening it was all scopes on Luna, but as it darkened some folks started steering to other targets. We saw globular clusters like M13, M94, in Jim's Meade 8" SCT, M10, M12, in Rose's 6" Schmidt/Newtonian, and M4 in Louis' refractor.. We resolved Double-Double in Lyra at over 200x in Nick's C8, then we also saw that fantastic binary system Albireo in Cygnus and some open clusters like the Tweedledee and Tweedledum in Scutum in Rose's scope.

But it was the Moon that wowed most of the guests on the night, with the crater Copernicus vividly showing a blackened and very deep interior, and Clavius well illuminated as well. The mountain ranges around Mare Imbrium were vividly rendered, and I don't think I've ever heard to many people ask about heights and depths on the Moon as I did last night. We had a lot of great questions from a steady stream of enthusiastic adults-of-all-ages visitors, and even an energetic group of soon-to-be 5th graders from Brendan's class of 2023'24 that dropped by to see Mr. Smith in a different setting than they're used to.

Scituate Harbor is a special setting that possesses an ambiance unmatched by most of the places that we set up. Earth's shadow, aka "The Belt of Venus" was on vivid display out over the Atlantic just after sunset, and of course if you turned around and looked the other way you were treated to the lovely colors of beautiful sunset in the west/northwest sky.

Once the sun set and darkness began trying to settle in, those of us that dared to show some skin were enthusiastically welcomed back to summer evenings at the harbor by that infamous group of little buggers known as "The Scituate Coastline No-Seeums", a tireless group of flesh-eaters eager to help anyone with their weight loss program, one tiny nibble at a time. Bug spray is recommended if you want to wear shorts and short sleeves.
All in all it was a splendid evening at the harbor and quite successful from an outreach perspective as well. Hopefully we'll get several more opportunities like it over the course of the summer. Remember, it's all about the Moon this year. We won't see Saturn decently positioned until at least September, and Jupiter won't come on the evening scene until November, by which time we've usually wrapped up the lighthouse nights unless there's something special going on.
Image Credits: sidewalk group; Mike M., all others; Rose Amaral.
Keep Looking Up!
Mike McCabe
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