White House Lawn Littered With Telescopes

Wednesday night the White House lawn was littered with telescopes and portable planetariums. 150 Washington area students were fortunate enough to spend the evening, which began before sunset, at a star gazing party hosted by the Obamas. Inflated tents had constellations and universes projected onto domed celings. A cavalcade of who’s who in astronomy was also present with ‘stars’ like Sally Ride, John Grunsfeld, Buzz Aldrin along with 2 amateur 15 year old astronomers with some heavy duty discoveries under their belts, just to name a few.

Lucky kids who got to attend. The President spoke of Galileo and how his telescope invention allowed all of this to be possible. A NASA astronomer with his home-built telescope announced:

“The Wild Duck Cluster is up,” Hudgins said as reporters toured the telescopes in the afternoon. “It’s an open cluster of stars in the Milky Way in the constellation of Scutum, I believe. It’s beautiful.”

The event was held to capture interest in astronomy and space. Many museums and planetariums around the county participated remotely. Sally Ride informed the crowd that middle schoolers start losing interest in science and hopefully events like these will keep kids on top of science and thinking it is cool.

Good for the Obamas for spearheading an event such as this. The Star Party went beyond the ordinary Easter Egg Roll and might very well inspire a young scientist to move beyond what we have imagined.

This Friday morning NASA will launch a rocket booster and space craft at the moon’s south pole in search of water.

From spaceweather.com :

LUNAR IMPACT: This Friday morning, Oct 9th, at approximately 4:30 am PDT, NASA’s LCROSS spacecraft and its Centaur booster rocket will plunge one after another into a shadowed crater near the Moon’s south pole. The spectacular double-impact will be shown live on NASA TV from the point of view of the LCROSS spacecraft. Meanwhile, impact debris plumes emerging from the crater may be visible through backyard telescopes. North American sky watchers west of the Mississippi river are favored with darkness and good views of the Moon at the time of impact. Visit http://spaceweather.com for observing tips and full coverage.

Watch the impact at 7:30 am Friday morning on NASATV.

Update: Scientists have discovered a huge super ring around Saturn.