Impromptu Astronomy Day at the Buffalo Museum of Science February 21, 2009

I just happened to stop by the museum to see the M101 mural that is a composite image of Hubble, Chandra, and Spitzer space telescope images when I saw a young lady sitting at a rather empty table demonstrating how Newtonian reflectors work. It seemed like a nice way to spend an afternoon so I offered my help and went out to my car and grabbed some astronomy related material and the Astroscan scope that was donated to the club by "The Science Kit". It's a great little scope for someone starting out and actually quite enjoyable for those of us that have been at it for a while. The museum actually had one of their own on hand too. It could use a bit of TLC however. I placed a scaled image of the sun approximately 75 feet way from the scope to demonstrate how far the sun would be away if the earth was the size of the small image(4mm) of the earth which I taped to the Astroscan. I also taped a SOHO poster on the railing of the second floor at the other end of Hamlin Hall. Most people just are curious enough to just want to look through the telescope even though we're just look at pictures taped to a wall.
Marilou Bebak manned the table near the M101 mural and answered any questions. I think we packed it up around 5PM. The little young lady above stole my heart 8^)