Astronomy Day will hold SUN day on Saturday
March 3, 2010 by Julissa Mesa
Filed under Features
This Saturday, Rowan students and local stargazers will have the chance to feed his or her inner space explorer by viewing the sun in the daytime at Rowan’s first ever Astronomy Day.
The department of astronomy and physics got the inspiration for the event because 2009 marked the International Year of Astronomy. Assistant physics and astronomy professor Jim Canna was assigned the event and its programming.
“We hope to make it an annual event. This year we decided to talk about the sun, but we hope each year will be on something different,” Canna said.
Saturday’s event, scheduled to begin at 1 p.m. in the Edelman Planetarium, is set to bring in people and make them aware of our planet and its surroundings.
“Many students have come forward to ask questions on the event,” said associate physics and astronomy professor Eddie Guerra.
The event is free and open to the public, not just Rowan students. If weather permits, there will be a daytime observation of the sun and Venus from 2:30 to 3:30 p.m. If not, there will be a showing of the IMAX movie, “Solarmax” in the planetarium.
“One way or the other it’ll be a fun day of events,” Canna said.
There will also be many different activities, from being able to view the sun with a hydro alpha (H-alpha) telescope weather permitting to introduction speeches on the sun and our solar system by faculty members Dr. Steve Simmerman, Planetarium Director Keith Johnson and physics and astronomy professor Lloyd Black.
The event will kick off with an introduction to the planetarium, followed by Simmerman’s lecture on solar eclipses and Black’s lecture on solar activity and sun spots.
“The sun is the closest star to Earth and is 150 million kilometers away, or if at the speed of light, the Sun is 8-1/3 light minutes away,” Black said. “In comparison, the next closest star is Proxima Centauri, which is 4.2 light-years/2,207,520 light minutes or about 266,000 times farther from Earth than our sun. without our sun, life would not exist, so some understanding about our solar system’s star would be useful.”
This school year thus far has been a busy one for the science and engineering departments. They have sponsored many public shows and plan to do so the rest of 2010.
“It’s exciting. We are talking about viewing things not many people know about or see,” Canna said.
The next event hosted by the department of astronomy and physics is a spring equinox lecture called “Finding Half the Starlight in the Universe: Adventures with the BLAST Experiment,” set to take place on March 25. The lecture will begin at at 7 p.m. in the Rowan Auditorium in the Engineering Building.