Director Announces Two Grants to Support New Astronomy Initiatives

Last winter I had breakfast with our team of eight astronomy volunteers, which is always enjoyable because they are filled with enthusiasm and suggestions on how to make our astronomy facilities and programs even better. This year they had urgent requests. They could no longer find replacement parts for our ageing 10” Meade telescope, and it was taking more and more “creativity” on their part just to keep it functional. This was distressing news indeed, not only because our NPF astronomy programs have been steadily building in popularity, but because we have just entered into an exciting partnership with Joel Barlow High School where the darkened pastures on the farm will become the field station for Barlow’s new Astronomy Program.
Optimistically the astronomers had put together a wish list that included a beautiful 14” Celestron telescope, a laptop computer, a CCD camera and accessories that came close to $14,000, far more than New Pond’s modest operating budget could accommodate.  Thankfully two wonderful local foundations came to our rescue, the Redding Education Foundation and the Meserve Memorial Fund.  Together their generous grants covered  the expenses—we are both thrilled and grateful!

  

The scope has already arrived and the astronomy volunteers are in the process of fine tuning it. It seems to be everything they hoped for (see letter from Juan Ivaldi below). Because of it’s larger 14” diameter it has a far greater light gathering capability which means that we will see more details on all celestial objects, and we will also have the educational opportunity to see objects that are found deeper in the night sky—star clusters and galaxies that have never been seen in our programs. This new scope also has “go to” capability, meaning that when preprogrammed, it will automatically move to the desired coordinates in the sky-so for example, our astronomers can press a few buttons and the scope will swing from the rings of Saturn to the moons of Jupiter to the star nebula in Orion’s belt in just a matter of seconds. This capability will be particularly useful when searching out fainter, deep sky objects.  What a pleasure when we have enthusiastic students waiting in line!

Hopefully by September we will have our remote internet hook up and our new CCD camera will arrive, the latter will enable us to capture views of faint deep sky objects with great detail. The Barlow students will be able to send these images back to school for their projects and our volunteers will be able to share them during NPF programs.

As time goes on this 14” Celestron will allow us to expand into astrophotography, variable star observing and supernova hunting. Educational research could be performed by the volunteers and used while mentoring high school students.

We send an enormous “Thank You” to both The Redding Education Foundation and the Meserve Memorial Fund-they have enabled us to take our astronomy programs to a new level! We look forward to sharing the new telescope with all of you!