Solar SUNday Part 1

We had a beautiful day up on the roof of the Buffalo Museum of Science today for about 2-3 hours of solar observing. Cliff Stoll (Bio: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Stoll Lecture: http://www.dailymotion.com/relevance/search/atmosphere/video/x4vhuy_clifford-stoll-on-tedcom_tech spent the afternoon up there with us answering all kinds of questions. One lucky young boy asked a question of Cliff and it was wonderful to watch the interaction! Cliff sat right down on the ground and answered his questions and more-Oh about 30 or more minutes later I think this young boy had all his questions answered and more. Cliff's interaction with this lad was not unlike his own experience as young boy when he showed up at the Buffalo Museum of Science, knocked on the door of Ernst Both and was enthusiastically welcomed and had his questions answered and encouraged to come back, which he did. That young boy today may not remember all the science he was taught during this encounter but he will surely remember the day on the roof of the museum when a really smart wonderfully quirky guy with mildly out of control hair spent time listening to a 11 or 12 year old and made him feel really smart and important. Hopefully we make this difference when we do our outreach. Young observer Maxim who is pictured above sitting at the 60mm Coronado won the "longest to sit at the scope award" He was at the scope at least 5 minutes enjoying the sun in H-alpha. I love when kids take their time when its their turn. He was awarded with a NASA 3D ruler, Solar CD, "Cosmic Collision" DVD and a 3D SOHO card
We had a nice bunch of BAA members show up to help Alan and I. Jeff Gardner had his Televue equipped with a 40mm H-alpha filter and Mark Morgis had his binos equipped with white light filters. Alan again had his Televue stowaway with his 90mm H-alpha filter as well as his silver lamay sun shield. I brought my Televue 101 with white light and 60mm Coronado. Unfortunately there were no sunspots but it was nice for our visitors to see the difference between the views with the different filters. Also helping answering questions and manning the scopes were Scott Smith, Ted Bistany, Carl Milazzo, Anu and his friend Aimee, Pete Proulx, Don Knecht. We also had fun handing out stickers saying "I Saw the SUn in H-Alpha- 656.28 nanometers") as well as some Solar NASA material.
The movie Solarmax played in the Astro-theatre.
We had about 100+ visitors up to catch some sun as well as to see some sun up close and personal. We were however competing with the yearly St. Patrick's Day parade in downtown Buffalo which mostly likely had record numbers due to the perfect weather. I'm sure may of those celebrating were seeing stars of there own after imbibing significant amounts of green beer.
I believe we packed it up around 3:30-4PM with some extra color to our UV deprived and Vitamin D deficient bodies.