Have an interest in the night sky? Hoping to try out a high-tech telescope? Drop by the field behind Calvert Library Fairview Branch from 7pm to 8:30pm on November 7th and join the Astronomy Club of Southern Maryland’s search of the skies. With cooperative weather, stargazers should see Venus, Uranus and Neptune as well as our moon and a variety of objects in the Milky Way galaxy like double stars, planetary nebulae, globular star clusters and open star clusters. According to club member and NASA Solar System Ambassador Chad Ellington, “You may even be able to catch sight of the Adromeda galaxy…over 2 million light years away.”
Tom Dugan and Chad Ellington recently helped create a display at the Calvert Library Prince Frederick to celebrate National Astronomy Day (October 13, 2013). The display includes an opportunity to see a prism dividing up white light into the colors of the rainbow; a “to scale” representation of Earth and our moon; replicas of the spacecrafts Integral and New Horizons (now on its way to Pluto) and the Hubble telescope; planispheres; a sky globe; meteorites and other space rocks.
If the exhibit and starwatching spark your interest, you might want to follow up with the Astronomy Club of Southern Maryland which meets once a month (based on the phase of the moon), usually at Jefferson Patterson Park. There are no dues and there are plenty of telescopes for viewing. For more information about the club, check out their website http://somd-astro.s5.com/. For more information about the event at the library, call Robyn Truslow at Calvert Library Prince Frederick at 410-535-0291 or 301-855-1862.
