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WILTON — Last Friday, Sept. 20, the Wilton Wildlife Preserve and Park held an astronomy party to view various celestial bodies. The party included staff and volunteers from the Preserve, Albany Area Amateur Astronomers, Inc. and the Southern Adirondack Astronomy Club.
Additionally, the Preserve’s staff served hot chocolate and apple cider and gave handouts detailing what objects should be visible and some of the rules of stargazing at a table set apart from the telescopes so that no light would accidentally occlude the viewings.
As people moved around, many used red lights since it allows people to keep most of their night vision while also allowing them to see more clearly.
Jupiter was by far the brightest object in the sky at the time, becoming visible to the naked eye before any other planet or star. The only objects that may have outshone it were the blinking lights on planes flying overhead and an object that viewers presumed was the International Space Station based on how quickly it moved across the sky.
Jeff Curren, one of the observers who brought his own telescope, said that there was nothing particularly special about the 20th in terms of viewable objects, it was just a nice viewing night.
As various people looked through his telescope, he also took out a laser pointer to show them some objects of note in the sky, such as Jupiter and Saturn and the stars Vega, Deneb and Altair, also known as the summer triangle.
Larry Glasheen, another observer who brought his own telescope, detailed the mechanics of the Newtonian telescope, which both he and Curren were using.
In short, starlight travels down the length of the telescope and bounces off of the large mirror at the back. This mirror’s collecting area determines how much light is being focused, so the larger the mirror, the better the resolution. Both Curren and Glasheen were using 12-inch mirrors.
The large mirror focuses the light into a smaller area and bounces it back to the front of the telescope, where a much smaller mirror redirects the light into an eyepiece coming out of the side of the telescope. The mechanics in the eyepiece then focus the light more to give a shaper image, which the user can view.
With this technology, Jupiter goes from a point of light in the sky to a ball of gas with different colored bands, and several of its more prominent moons become visible points of light, instead of being lost in the planet’s glare.
An evening sky map provided at the party noted some of the other objects, constellations and celestial events either happening or visible during September.
The previously mentioned star Altair, the brightest star in the Aquila constellation, was among the objects visible with the naked eye. The various visible stars and other bodies form the over a dozen visible constellations during September.
The Andromeda galaxy, along with various nebulae and clusters are visible with binoculars. Dim objects and objects very far away, including red giant stars and distant nebulae, require a telescope to see.
Curren explained that there were even more objects in the sky, but many are simply too dim for the human eye to register without computer assistance.
He compared it to having a white plate and shaking pepper on it once versus continually for 10 minutes. The human eye only registers the light that it sees at that moment. No matter how good the telescope is, if the object is too dim, there will simply not be enough light to see it. A telescope that is taking a long exposure though, like a camera, captures all of the light coming in, allowing for even extremely faint objects to become visible.
For more information, visit www.wiltonpreserve.org, or call 518-450-0321.
