This weekend we did something different. I am ashamed to admit that I have lived an hour from Raleigh for 8 years now and have never really been downtown. We fixed that on Saturday.
This past weekend, the Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh held it's annual Astronomy Days along with the Raleigh Astronomy Club. The event involves a lot of displays and hands on projects and a couple speakers and events that highlight astronomy, NASA, emerging technologies and other related topics. It's geared toward adults as well as kids and was a blast.
We arrived to find some of the RAC members set up outside. One had a 6" Newtonian telescope, one had a refractor, and one had a Solarscope. All were fitted with solar filters to allow viewers to see the sun it all it's glory without worrying about having any retinas burnt out. I looked through both the reflector and the solarscope and got to see a small amount of activity on a big orange ball. It was pretty neat, but since we are at the bottom of the next Solar Cycle, there wasn't a lot to see.
Also outside was a launch area for small air powered rockets that were built by kids in one of the museum's activity rooms. We had a good time outside watching the little kids launching soda bottle rockets into the air after the countdown.
We proceeded inside and wandered around most of the day from exhibit to exhibit. There were telescope exhibits, amateur rocketry exhibits, solar weather, Astronomy, nature and a whole host of other related topics. They even had a flight simulator that was supposed to allow you to try docking a space shuttle with the International Space Station, but all I saw on it was an ultralight flying over some Caribbean islands.
The highlight for me was a talk by Dr. Roger Crouch, who flew on two shuttle missions as a payload specialist. Dr. Crouch is a Hokie, and a pretty affable guy who gave us all a first hand account about what it's like sitting on top of a few million pounds of high explosive, what it's like being weightless, and what it's like being an astronaut.
He then went into the challenges faced in getting humans to Mars. Technical aspects aside, one thing that people don't understand is that there are a lot of human aspects to such a mission as well. There's bone and muscle loss experienced for each month in weightlessness for one thing, and that isn't even touching on the psychological aspects. Imagine being stuck in a 10X20 foot room with 6 other people for the next three years, and no chance of leaving that room.
All in all, we had a great time. Afterwards, we walked around the capitol building in Raleigh and the old Farmer's Market. We had an incredibly tasty dinner at Tir na Nog, an Irish place at Moore Square.
I am glad we got to do this, it's been a long time since we really did something fun together. Sure we get to go walk around the mall every so often and we spend some time together, but we don't get to do things like this very often, so I try to enjoy the times we do.
As a side note, this piqued my interest in Astronomy again. I used to enjoy stargazing and such, but haven't really done anything with it in years. I am hopefully going to pick up a nice 6" Newtonian myself this week and maybe when the weather clears I'll be able to go see the planets and stars. The ultimate goal though, is to combine this with my photography and allow me to learn astrophotography, which is very technical, and not as easy as just pointing to the sky and snapping off a few frames.
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