On the first and third Fridays of the month, the McCormick Observatory is open for Public Night between 9pm and 11pm. I figured that they would just open the doors and lead you to figure things out for yourself, but was pleasantly surprised to find my astronomy professor in the large room with the 26-inch Alvan Clark Refractor! It was pretty cloudy, so the viewing wasn’t great, but Professor Murphy instructed us that the light we were looking at (from whichever nebula it was…I can’t remember) was just reaching us after shining in 700 BC. THAT is something I will not forget.
Back in the main building the room with the projector was surprisingly packed with people, even more surprisingly with children (it was nearing my bedtime after all). There was an educator there too doing the “grapefruit Sun” demonstration which compares the distance and size of a “sprinkle Earth” in a model display. The kids loved those orange and blue sprinkles.
Kimberly, Heather and I then moved outside to the smaller telescopes and caught a glimpse of Orion’s nebula and a very faint binary star system that revealed a star you couldn’t see with the naked eye. The TA’s up there scoffed at us when Heather said to “stay warm,” and I knew exactly how they felt because Joe and I had had a 2 hour lab up here in 19° weather! On the mountain, this 45° was balmy.
I still maintain that the best part of the observatory is the view… I never knew Charlottesville was so pretty at night (the main picture at the top is of the city lights, not star systems haha). The beauty and culture of this night somehow led us back to watch and make fun of New Moon: not quite astronomically related but perhaps just as entertaining!
“Metaphor for the night sky: A trillion asterisks and no explanations.” -- Robert Brault
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