Total Lunar Eclipse Wednesday October 27

This image is by Ft Smith astronomer Rick Day of the May 15th, 2003 Lunar Eclipse.

Last Total Lunar Eclipse for the Americas until 2007

Public Invited to Share Eclipse Views October 27th

On Wednesday evening, October 27th, the Arkansas Oklahoma Astronomical Society invites the public to join us at Carol Ann Cross Park in Ft Smith to view a Total Lunar Eclipse. Viewing will begin at 7:00PM. The eclipse will begin at 8:14PM and mid-eclipse will be at 10:04PM. This lunar eclipse will be the last of its kind until 2007.

Come join members of the Arkansas Oklahoma Astronomical Society to view the last total lunar eclipse of the year, as well as the last lunar eclipse until 2007 for any of the Americas. As always, we offer these public observing sessions for free, and the public is encouraged to bring your own cameras and telescopes and we'll help you take home an image of the eclipse of your own.

This will also be the last "Stars in the Parks" event for this observing season. We have enjoyed working with the Ft Smith Parks Department to bring the public a little taste of amateur astronomy, and we will schedule another season for next year to begin in mid-March. Check back often to find the 2005 schedule of dates and locations in January.

We will also be presenting demonstrations on how we find planets orbiting around distant stars. This is one of the activities in the Night Sky Network PlanetQuest Outreach Toolkit. Another presentation explains with scale models of our Solar System, our Milky Way Galaxy, and our Galaxy's nearest neighbor Galaxies to show how all these relate to each other in our little corner of the Universe as part of the newest NSN Toolkit, "Our Galaxy; Our Universe"

These are part of the Night Sky Network's tools for helping people understand difficult concepts by providing a hands-on experience for a better understanding. AOAS is proud to be a founding member club in the NSN. Night Sky Network is sponsored by NASA and JPL, and is administered to a nationwide network of over 175 clubs by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

The Night Sky Network has logged nearly 700 public events and touched nearly 60,000 people since it began in March 2004.