Hey everyone! I’m putting on stargazing classes in my city with the help of the city parks dept. It involves lugging out 12" dob (we mostly hang out ~120x mag, but I have plans to really juice the magnification if we get small classes and good seeing), some binoculars, and a green laser pointer. I just did the first one last night, and I found it to be a hugely rewarding experience. Unfortunately, the class was a bit on the smaller side and not asking too many questions (I think because it was cold AF for California), and I found the energy kind of flagging halfway through. My plan has been to teach the basics of star finding, telescope use, etc. and follow the Astronomical League’s Urban Stargazing program (I want to help folks get certified if they’re interested). I was wondering if anyone else has done any kind of astronomy public outreach and if they had any advice to help keep the engagement up when folks are taking turns peeking through the scope. In case you might be wondering, it’s not a GOTO or PUSH TO scope, I personally find that there’s a bit of magic in manually slewing the scope, but it does unfortunately mean that I spend extra time bringing the scope back on target between students using it.

We ended up with probably a dozen participants, with most coming and going within about 20 mins out of the hour. Again, I think the weather was a big part of it, but I was really hoping they would find it worth it to stay. We started the night off viewing Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and Venus, (not part of the urban stargazing program, but I wanted to include them), and moved on to showing the Pleiades and Hyades through low mag binoculars, and then on to the Orion Nebula and Theta Orionis, and finally Gamma Andromedae. Then, most people started to dip and we just kind of did requests until the end of class. Maybe I’m just enough of a dork that it would have kept me around in spite of the weather, but I worry that it wasn’t interesting enough. Any advice would be appreciated.