Astronomy Events

On Jan 7 Joe Carro and I attended a star party at Trinity Lutheran Church School in Paso Robles at the invitation of Jackie Loper- one of the teachers at this school. This event was a wild success with 50 or so students and parents in attendance. To start with- [Read More…]

December 1, 2010 Visitors: Administrators, Adults and students from the Guadalupe-Nipomo, Dunes Center Chris Estrada, Dave Majors, and I (Tom Frey) held a star party on 12/1/10 at the Nipomo Native Gardens (NNG) in Nipomo, CA. This was at the request made to Cindy Jelinek and Charlie Gulyash, members of [Read More…]

There’s a full lunar eclipse on Dec 21st at 3:17am Eastern Time (12:17am Pacific) which is visible from all of North America! If you have no idea what a lunar (as opposed to solar) eclipse is, check out this new JPL information video: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/video/index.cfm?id=950 For those of you more experienced [Read More…]

On the night of 28 November 2010, a star party was held at a residence in West Templeton. Astronomer Joseph Carro met with Mary Gardner and members of her family. There were five adults and six children at the house on Claassen Road. Upon his arrival, the skies were cloudy, [Read More…]

From Dave Majors: I was at the Boy Scout event on 10/29-30 with over 500 scouts and possibly rainy weather, and it turned out better than I thought it would (given the weather forecast). It clouded over as the sun was going down but I did get the chance to [Read More…]

I figure we will be asked about the planet discovery that was in the paper so here are the stats: Star Name: Gliese 581 – also listed as variable star HO Lib Spect: M3V Mass: .031 Suns Luminosity: .013 Suns Apparent Mag: 10.55 Surface Temp: 3500 K Distance: 20 ly [Read More…]

After being worked on at Reed and Chris Estrada’s place in Lancaster, California, the 1 meter photometric telescope has been moved back to the Orion Observatory (near Santa Margarita Lake not far from San Luis Obispo, California). Below are some photographs (taken by Cheryl Genet) of the telescope being set [Read More…]