Sierra Club Delta (Louisiana) Chapter Calendar page

Please join us for one of any of the many events you will find below. Want some fun? Sign up for one of our outings on our outings page. Want to get serious? Join us for one of our activist meetings.

Some of the activities listed below are NOT Sierra Club activities. They appear here in the interest of gaining the widest possible distribution.

Contact Delta Chapter Assistance for information.

April 2008

The Highland Road Park Observatory in Baton Rouge is hosting a series of free lectures on light control.

As one of the few (if not only) observatories in the country open free of charge every weekend of the year, HRPO staff and volunteers have the wonderful job of showing the Sun, the Moon, stars, planets, comets and other celestial objects to families and individuals from around the city and elsewhere. HRPO’s 20-inch reflector has been used to discover over fifty asteroids.

However, over the last few years the light control problem in East Baton Rouge Parish has grown worse, hindering our ability to image these objects—especially deep-sky objects such as clusters (groups of stars gravitationally bound to one another) and nebulae (enormous patches of gas and dust in interstellar space). It’s questionable whether, at this point in time, the Baton Rouge skies would be dark enough to allow one to discover those same asteroids.

On 18 April the lecture will focus on uncontrolled artificial light’s hindrance of stargazing.

On 25 April Claire Coco, manager of the Bluebonnet Swamp Nature Center, will speak on the lack of light control’s effect on the nocturnal habits of wildlife.

Finally, the 2 May lecture will attempt to put the financial cost in perspective.

All the lectures are Fridays at 7:30pm and will last from thirty to sixty minutes. After each talk, visitors will learn steps they can take to halt, and possibly reverse, the amount of excessive light in their neighborhoods. They will also, weather permitting, view objects through our new 16-inch reflector; Mars and Saturn will be out.

Here is the flyer (88 Kb PDF) for this lecture series.

HRPO is sponsored by BREC, LSU’s Department of Physics and the Baton Rouge Astronomical Society.

Thanks,
Christopher Kersey
Manager, Highland Road Park Observatory
13800 Highland Road
Baton Rouge, LA 70810
(225) 768-9948
observatory@brec.org
www.bro.lsu.edu