More than 7,000 people flocked to the 100 Hours’ kickoff event: the Franklin’s opening of “Galileo, the Medici and the Age of Astronomy,” which will run through September 7. On Thursday, a live web stream transmitted a look through one of Galileo’s original telescopes to audiences around the world. At the Carnegie’s Buhl Planetarium and Observatory, visitors during the day observed prominences of the sun through a solar telescope, and at night–with assistance from the Amateur Astronomer’s Association of Pittsburgh–observed craters of the moon and the planet Saturn. The night also included a planetarium show, Two Small Pieces of Glass, produced in collaboration with the Carnegie, Hawaii’s Imiloa Astronomy Center, and California’s Interstellar Studios.
Some 14 other events took place across Pennsylvania–among some 441 planned in the U.S. and over 1,000 around the world. “A mix of students, families, and other folks wandered by,” Ken Coles, planetarium director at Indiana University of PA, reports. It was worth a chilly evening to view the heavens.
The Delaware Valley Amateur Astronomers and the Bucks-Mont Astronomical Association entertained more than 85 sky-watchers at Montgomery Community College, using the school’s observatory and the amateurs’ own telescopes for filtered views of the sun in daytime and the crescent of Venus at night. The Lehigh Valley Amateur Astronomy Association treated 65 guests to two planetarium shows and presentations about telescopes in space and opened the skies to views through the association’s two observatories and tripod-mounted binoculars and telescopes.
“We enjoyed the wonderful waxing gibbous moon, the Pleiades star cluster, Saturn, and the Great Nebula in Orion,” Don Knabb reports for 30 observers gathered Saturday night at Hoopes Park for the Chester County Astronomical Society‘s event.
Centennial School District in Warminster entertained more than 100 guests during a community sky tour Saturday evening. Likewise, more than 75 residents from Columbia and Montour counties visited the Greenwood Friends School in Millville for an interplanetary performance and a tour of the Milky Way and constellations of the zodiac in the school’s inflatable planetarium, which substituted for a starry night event that would have been otherwise covered by clouds.
Source: Franklin Institute, Carnegie Science Center, 100 Hours of Astronomy event coordinators
Writer: Joseph Plummer