by Gene Allen

The Outreach Team was invited by a teacher at Stuart Country Day School to introduce star gazing to a class of 4th grade girls plus their parents and siblings. The original date was heavily clouded but the rain date of February 27 started out perfectly clear.

Being only two nights before Full Moon denied us most of the constellations and many of our favorite sights, but we started by showing a bit of lunar detail with the terminator not quite at the southeastern edge. The Pleiades were nicely visible even naked eye, but the nice Mizar-Alcor double was not. Orion was faint but we managed to show The Great Nebula in binoculars and resolve four stars of the Trapezium in a 10” Dobsonian.

An Astronomers Without Borders OneSky, a 5” Newtonian in a tabletop Dobsonian mount, saw First Light and represented itself very well as a $200 starter scope, though it needed a stool to be low enough for the girls.

High clouds encroached to end the program early but the originator declared it a great success.

Ted Frimet, John Giles, David Letcher, and myself participated tonight. Outreach events are entered into the website calendar for everyone to see. Any members who would like to join us for any event or join the Outreach Committee, please write to outreach@princetonastronomy.org.