Spring Astronomy Day – May 15th 2021 at Root River Park

[John Martin]

Hello all! I’m not sure why I didn’t think to post this as a discussion on the forum before (Thanks, John A!)

We are planning for the Spring Astronomy Day on May 15, 2021 @ 9:00 pm – 11:00 pm  at Root River Park.

Public Sky Observing 2021-05/15 – Astronomy Day

Mike and I met at Root River today and looked at the layout. A couple of good things – they did a controlled burn of the fields near the picnic area, so that should help with the bugs. The cellular service in that area seems to be good enough to broadcast a live zoom meeting from there if we choose to. I was able to start a zoom meeting with video and then sign into the meeting with another devices to see if the video feed was stable. It seemed to be fine.
Mike will set up further away from the observing area since he will be displaying the view from his telescope on a screen, which will generate light. I’ll set up the table in the picnic area at the border of the parking lot to meet people and talk about our protocols to keep people safe.
Mike had a good suggestion to see if we can keep families / households together as they observe so that we do not have to do too much sanitizing between viewings.
I have sanitizer and masks that I can put on the greeting table. I don’t think that I will be able to cover the table and also run the Zoom meeting for the event at the same time if it gets crowded, so maybe we can get another volunteer for one of those two tasks? Or we can just forget the Zoom broadcast if there aren’t enough club members to cover all stations?
So far I believe that 4 of us have signed up for the event.
The park was crowded when I got there! So much so that I first has to park outside of the parking lot. I bet that people are anxious to get out. Maybe this might turn out to be a busy event?

[Author]

Posts