On March 6, our astronomy group held another public observing evening in Emden, with telescopes spread across the schoolyard and plenty of people stopping by for a look at the night sky.
The observing site is right inside Emden, so it was never going to be an ideal place for deep sky objects. But it was one of those rare evenings with an exceptionally steady atmosphere which made Jupiter the evenings highlight.
Through the telescopes, the two main cloud bands were clearly visible, along with much finer structures that are often lost when the atmosphere is more turbulent. At some point, I simply held my phone up to the eyepiece and took a few photos. I unfortunately don’t remember which telescope it was, but considering that these were just smartphone shots through an eyepiece, I was rather surprised by the result.
One thing I particularly enjoyed that evening was seeing how enthusiastic some of the younger visitors were. A few girls in particular were completely fascinated by what they could see through the telescopes. One even had her own telescope with her asking questions about it. Seeing that kind of excitement is probably one of my favourite parts of public observing nights.
One of the students was supposed to talk about the supernova remnant M1, but apparently didn’t have an image of his own. So I set up the DWARF 3 and started collecting some exposures of the nebula for him. The result wasn’t particularly spectacular, but at least M1 was clearly there.
By the time I had collected some data, however, the student had apparently disappeared.
So I ended the evening with a Crab Nebula image looking for its intended owner, several surprisingly decent smartphone photos of Jupiter and a schoolyard full of people who had spent the evening looking through telescopes.