Earth Hour Public Star Party by Dublin Sidewalk Astronomers

As soon as you put a date on a major event the SCUD factor comes in. The weather gods are probably throwing a party. Keep your voice down when you mention Cosmos.

Go figure... a great opportunity to get astronomy noticed some more, especially in urban areas, and the weather has to go and feck it all up... getting lightning down here this afternoon and evening.

Seanie.

Lightening? why do I always miss the fun bad weather?

(would like to take some lightening photos)

Hi folks,

Pity about the weather tonight. It even affected my flight home!

Seems there was plenty of coverage of earth hour here. I even heard one radio interview in Cairns, Australia mentioning that Dublin was supporting the event. In Aus there have been full page ads and plenty of articles in the papers for the past week; the council in Cairns put up a large billboard on the main road into the city to promote the event and a local cinema was offering a free pass to see a film for anyone who turned their lights off at home.

I'm a bit jetlaged to read through the press articles tonight but special thanks to all who organised events for tonight!

Damn this weather. I'm seriously thinking of taking up cloud watching as a profession.

Well OK it was 100% cloudy in Sandymount last night.
It was Earth hour but nobody told the Planet.
So what do you do when you have advertised an event, which also happens to be global, and the sky is hiding?

Do you pack up your scope? Do you leave your house? Are ye bothered?
Yes Yes Yes you do, because people are going to arrive anyway.

We had nothing to show passers by but we gave out leaflets about Earth Hour. People stopped for a chat, we told who we are and what we do.

John Murphy and his children came, Michael Murphy, John O'Neill, Patricia Carroll, Liam Smyth, Val Dunne, David Branigan, Yvonne Brown, Paul Byrne, and Keith Deveney, all cared enough to bother.

We had boots full of telescopes; we just set up two as talking points for people. If we had have thought about it we could have run a telescope work shop as people wanted to know how to connect cameras to telescopes . People told us they had telescopes but were not sure what to do with them. We invited them to come back to our next event in Sandymount with their scopes and we will help sort them out.

There is a clear view of Dublin bay at Sandymount, some members took photographs of the before and after the lights out effort. I am not sure if it was that perceptible.? Maybe next year more lights will be turned off.

Well done Albert for your work in the battle against light pollution.

Thanks to IAS members and friends of the IAS who came along for the craic, the chats, and the fun ,not for the first time in a cloudy Sandymount.

Our next adventure will be International Sidewalk Astronomy Night April 12th in Sandymount www.sidewalkastronomynight.com/id20.html
All welcome

Deirdre Kelleghan

www.deirdrekelleghan.com/
Oscail do Shuile D'iontas na Cruinne
Open Your Eyes to the Wonder of the Universe
homepage.eircom.net/~irishas/index.htm



John O'Neill and David Branigan telescope talk



Liam Smyth and John O'Neill more telescope talk



Liam Ward IAS and Lei Zhao astronomy talk



Michael Murphy IAS, Paul Byrne, and Keith Deveney turbo charged astronomy talking

Honestly, I hadn't been drowning my Cloudy Skies sorrows with a naggin of whiskey as it appears in that last photo!! :oops: :oops: The camera just caught me when I was blinking!!

Anyway, embarressing photo aside, I can still say that I had an enjoyable night. As usual, the conversation was stimulating, interesting, astronomy and non astronomy related and we had lots of laughs. I still tried to slip in a few astronomy related puns into the conversations and Paul, Michael and John still pretended that they hadn't heard them a million times before and gave this newbie sympathy chuckles

I'm finding its worth going to these events, if for those reasons alone and if we get some clear skies its a bonus.

Thinking I might make an effort to go to Cosmos after all for the craic never mind the stars .