7:30pm to 10:00pm
Saturday night is the best time to bring children under eleven, who may be interested in looking through the scopes but not necessarily in sitting for a lecture.
Complementing the sky viewing is a table of easy-to-understand physical science demonstrations. Each week is something different. Will it be the radiometer? The handboiler? The hematite magnets?
Also operating most Saturday nights is the cloud chamber, a clever device resembling a small aquarium or terrarium, but filled inside with ethyl alcohol and underneath with dry ice, and utilizing electricity. When cosmic rays are active, a number of their tracks can be seen zipping through the fog inside the chamber!
Finally, what’s Saturday night at HRPO without the marshmallow roast? Weather and staff complement permitting, the campfire pit is the site of a one- to two-hour roast (depending on number of visitors), ending no later than 9:30pm.
Created by Frederick J. Barnett on Friday, April 03, 2009 10:12 AM