Rosemead Park, August 22

The last summer concert in the park is this Friday, so this may also be the last Rosemead Sidewalk Astronomy event for a while. I've got a short post about the actual concert on the Save Our Community website, at http://www.saveourcommunity.us/

Jupiter will be bright and visible in the southwest as darkness falls. This will be our main attraction for Friday (well, I mean, unless you're mainly coming for the music!), although I may try for a few other objects. Venus might also be visible early in the evening, although it will be low and not very interesting to look at.

Rosemead Park is located north of Mission, west of Encinitas and south of Lower Azusa. From the south, you'd go north on Rosemead Blvd and turn right at Mission. From the north, if you're early or late you can turn left on Lower Azusa and right on Encinitas and use the small lot off of Encinitas, or park on Encinitas or one of the sidestreets. Otherwise, you'll likely have to park off of Mission, and possibly even across Mission.

Report on August 8 Sidewalk Astronomy

Somewhat trouble-plagued concert. 80-Degrees did a good job, with lots of familiar music. Unfortunately, the sound system cut out a couple of times. This wasn’t something that happened at the last two concerts, so I’m not sure why we had so much trouble tonight.

We also had a pretty light turnout for the concert. That’s probably because of counter-programming: A lot of folks stayed home to watch the opening ceremony for the Olympics. That always strikes me as kinda boring but it is one of those events that people want to share with the world, so there you go.

Despite the smaller number of concert goers, the number of people stopping by to look through our telescopes was way up. I suspect we had about 150-200 visits, although many of those were repeats who stopped by several times throughout the evening. That probably means about 80 unique visits. At times, people were lined up, four-deep, on both telescopes.

Caroline and I had two telescope set up tonight. We had both on the moon early. Then, once it got dark enough to find Jupiter, I pointed the larger one to track the gas giant.
For some reason, my smaller, older mount wasn’t tracking. It started acting goofy on Tuesday, when I had it set up on the moon at the National Night Out event in Zapopan Park. I was hoping it was just a weak battery, but the problems continued tonight, with a fully-charged battery. So, once again, I kept it at low power and manually pushed it along to follow the moon.

We both had a lot of fun sharing the sky with everyone who stopped by.

Tomorrow (Saturday, August 9), from around 7:30pm - 10:00pm, we’ll be joining our friends with Old Town Astronomers in Monrovia. A special treat: There’s a very bright flyby of the International Space Station scheduled for around 8:10pm. The sky will still be pretty bright, but the ISS should be bright enough to see.