Lunar Outreach at the Lonsdale Pier
“It is a beautiful and delightful sight to behold the body of the Moon.”
― Galileo Galilei, The Starry Messenger, Venice 1610: “From Doubt to Astonishment”
Takurrito’s first official outreach event, on the evening of June 6, 2022, was a resounding success! After what felt like an eternity of cloud cover, the forecast called for clear, steady skies on Monday evening. I decided to trust the forecast and ignore the substantial cloud cover still present when I lugged my gear over to the pier at the Shipyards around 8 pm, well before sunset at 9:15 pm, since the 6-day old moon was high over the south-west sky, providing potential for the best seeing earlier in the evening.
It was my second time using the AZ-EQ6 mount, having purchased it the prior week, and I was glad to set it up while it was still light out. While I was setting up, people came by to ask what I was doing. Someone asked, “Is there anything special happening tonight?”
“No, just looking at the moon. But the moon’s special every night,” I replied. Judging from the reactions of the 150 people or so who looked at the moon through the telescope that evening, I think they agreed.
Once I finished setting up, I found the moon, no finderscope needed, using the 35mm Panoptic eyepiece, which shows a 3-degree actual field of view, as wide as 6 full moons. I then switched to the 10mm Delos, an excellent eyepiece for outreach due to its combination of superb optics, wide field of view, easy eye placement, and generous eye relief, making it possible for people with glasses to view. It fit the entire disk of the moon at an 80x magnification.
The telescope started to attract more attention, and I invited people to come to take a look. Even though it was still light out, the amount of detail visible through the telescope is stunning; the moon is one of the few things in astronomy (other than perhaps the Sun, Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars) that look better than photographs. Tonight, with the above-average seeing, the craters in the Southern Highlands looked impossibly dense, and the Apennines mountain range cast massive jet-black shadows befitting of their 5km-high peaks.
Not a single person said no when I asked if they wanted to look through the scope. For most, it was their first time seeing the moon through a telescope. People gasped, swore, and sometimes did a double-take, glancing up from the eyepiece to see the moon with their naked eyes, as if to confirm it was real. Some people would take a quick peek, and others stood there for a while, spellbound by the view.
One person started to pray at the eyepiece, and she told me afterwards that God was greater than we imagine. Another showed me her iPhone lock screen afterwards, which featured an image of the moon, and told me she had never seen it like that with her own eyes before. Groups of friends came by, and the first one at the eyepiece without exception shouted at their friends to come to look. A couple of people told me that they would never forget this view for the rest of their lives.
Around 9:30 pm, the clouds started to roll in, completely covering the moon. Martin, co-president of the newly rebooted SFU Astronomy Club, came by to hang out while we waited for the clouds to part. Turns out that I had (briefly) met him at the recent Starry Nights event at SFU! We chatted for a while about running a club, telescopes, dark skies, and a variety of other topics.
Eventually, as the forecast predicted, the clouds started to completely clear, and Martin got a chance to look through the Takahashi. “This scope is really something else” was his review!
Around 11:15 pm we decided to pack up for the night. The first outreach with Takurrito went extremely well. I enjoyed talking to people and listening to their reactions, and their gratitude was genuinely moving. I think at least 150 people got to see the moon, many for the first time through a scope. Due to the light pollution, I’ll have to stick to the brighter objects in the night sky, but I know that the planets in the fall will be dazzling and I’ll be out there with my scope to share with as many people as I can the wonders of the night sky.