Star Parties (2016/2017)

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Star Parties

Bodenham Lake

We've agreed to hold a Star Party with Herefordshire Wildlife Trust in February. The Trust covers the county of Herefordshire and works closely with neighbouring Wildlife Trusts in England and Wales. The Trust is supported by over 3000 local members and manages 54 nature reserves. The Trust manages Queenswood and Bodenham Lake and the plan is to hold the Star Party in the car park at Bodenham Lake where members and visitors can park and we can set up our equipment. If it's cloudy we can use the facilities at Queenswood to give talks and demonstrate equipment.

Mark has been on site at Bodenham Lake with Hayley Herridge from the Trust and he's reported back that it is a wonderfully dark site. The moon doesn't rise until about midnight on the 16^th so let's hope for some clear dark skies.

We had a marvelous time with Herefordshire Wildlife Trust at their Star Party - even though it was completely clouded over. We moved venue to their studies building at Queenswood where Mark gave a couple of talks on the night sky using Stellarium and an introduction to telescopes and what you can expect to see through them. This was followed by Chris giving a repeat performance of his "It's written in the stars" talk he gave to the society at our Christmas meeting. Intriguingly, Chris had to make no changes to his talk to make it entirely suitable for the Star Party audience of 6-12 year old children. Everyone enjoyed and appreciated both Mark and Chris's talks. James was there to demonstrate his venerable telescope and binoculars and Martin brought along a Universe2go AR viewer through which the children (and adults) could look at the stars and planets in the night sky.

Some of the families were very interested in our offer for them to join us at our Observing evenings at Berrington Hall to help set up and use their own telescopes.

The software Mark demonstrated was Stellarium - this is free to use and can be found at the Stellarium website here.

MESC - TBD

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