I have been volunteering at the Chabot Space and Science Center since June. I go every other Friday for about 4 or 5 hours. The first hour is a meeting with all of the people on the astronomy team. We usually watch a video or sometimes we have a guest speaker or a presentation of some sort. We had a professor from East Bay come in and talk about what we know and don't know about dark matter which was really cool. After the first hour, we take out the telescopes if it isn't cloudy or humid. We usually have two people at each telescope. Some of my favorite objects to show people are the Perseus double cluster, the owl cluster, Albireo, and Pleaides. The clusters are just a bunch of stars that either appear close to each other or are physically close to each other. Albireo is a double star in the constellation Cygnus or the Northern Cross. It looks like one star, but once it is magnified it reveals two very different stars. One of them is much hotter than the other which causes it to burn blue, while the other one appears red. It is really frustrating when we try and view deep space objects like M31 the Andromeda Galaxy and the moon is out. The moon's light causes every object in the sky to be a bit fainter. There is one full moon about every 4 weeks. After spending time up there I have been able to point out a lot of new objects which I usually don't look at.
I will start breaking my larger tasks up into smaller tasks to help me with time management the rest of the year. For example, my homework assignments, essays, and projects. I think it will help a lot if I divide the work up.
