ASPB Helps Girl Scouts Work on Astronomy Merit Badge

Jay Albert - November, 2008

After two prior cancellations due to rain, the ASPB finally hosted a program for the Girl Scouts on Friday night, November 7th at the Corbett Wildlife Management Area in northern Palm Beach County. We had nine telescopes, each set up as a station covering various aspects of the scouting astronomy merit badge program. There were 196 scouts from 20 troops of the Girl Scouts of Southeast Florida Council rotated through each station plus about 100 parents, siblings and scouting officials. The program started a bit earlier than the 8pm published time and ran until 10pm. My thanks to Laura Woods, Kyle Morse, Bob Guzauskas, Steve Schiff, Maris Whetstone, Jim Mayes, Gary Wasserstein and Bob Barr for joining me for this event.

We were lucky with the weather this time. The sky was mostly clear, with some thin clouds coming late in the session. We had early views of Venus and Jupiter and the Moon was just past first quarter. The temperature was probably in the low 70’s dropping to the high 60’s later with no wind and few bugs. Among the topics covered for the merit badge program were constellation identification and lore, the north star and its use in navigation, mapping the stars, observing the planets, the Moon, the parts of a telescope and how they work and meteors. Steve Schiff did a particularly stirring job on constellation lore with the legend of Andromeda and Perseus. At the end of his recounting of this legend, his audience broke into cheers and enthusiastic applause. Unfortunately, there were no park attendants to turn off the lights, so observing deep sky objects was very difficult and we couldn’t see meteors, even though we were in the peak of the Taurid meteor shower. The scout leaders thoughtfully provided refreshments for everyone.

I was impressed with how well behaved and enthusiastic the scouts were. At the end of the evening and the next day, I received reports that the evening was a big success. Sherri Collins, the scout leader in charge of the event, was delighted with the response and has asked that we consider doing this on a bi-annual basis. Sherri suggested that next time we consider using the rifle range where we’ll have fewer trees and no lights.

Photos courtesy of Steve Schiff