(Hopefully pictures will be posted later, when I get them from the photographer)
Drepung Loseling owns a lovely telescope, clearly optimized to be portable and simple. Last year there was an evening where some of the physics instructors set it up and many monks were invited to come and see the planets and moon. I saw fliers up around the monastery! However, clouds quickly rolled in. I believe that was the first time the telescope was used. I wasn't there - I was either sleeping or working on slides.
Tonight, a group of us were leaving the monastery after dinner and I noticed the sky was clear. Given the whole "monsoon season", this is a bit of a surprise! I had previous discussed the lack of clear sky with some of the other instructors. Seeing the clear moon and some planets, we turned around to find our Science Monk and set up the telescope. Luckily, we also found the physics instructor who actually runs an observatory and could identify the planets.
Since it was last minute, we didn't have that big of a group of monks. Many would walk by and someone would yell out what they could look at. We were able to see the moon, Jupiter and 4 moon, Mars, and Saturn and its rings! The monks asked many questions about the planets and moon, and many were excited by what they saw. In many ways it was like having American students look through telescopes - some of them tried taking pictures through the eyepiece with their cellphones.
One of our instructors had a nice camera and grabbed the tripod for it to do long-exposure photography. He got a number of nice pictures of the starts and planets by the monastery, the monks at the telescope, and a number of pictures of the instructors. There was some fun with long-exposure "light writing" as well.
Amazing, I got to use a portion of my Tibetan vocab. The days of the week are named after the planets, so I can name all of the objects we saw in Tibetan! I don't know if the Tibetans have names for the specific moons of Jupiter, but I barely know those in English.
We hope to get the telescope back out tomorrow evening, as it is the monks' day off and many will be around. I don't know if we will be lucky enough to have two clear nights in a row - the clouds did roll in today after we were out there about an hour. Hopefully the sky is clear for a bit tomorrow, and more monks are able to look through the telescope.
Drepung Loseling owns a lovely telescope, clearly optimized to be portable and simple. Last year there was an evening where some of the physics instructors set it up and many monks were invited to come and see the planets and moon. I saw fliers up around the monastery! However, clouds quickly rolled in. I believe that was the first time the telescope was used. I wasn't there - I was either sleeping or working on slides.
Tonight, a group of us were leaving the monastery after dinner and I noticed the sky was clear. Given the whole "monsoon season", this is a bit of a surprise! I had previous discussed the lack of clear sky with some of the other instructors. Seeing the clear moon and some planets, we turned around to find our Science Monk and set up the telescope. Luckily, we also found the physics instructor who actually runs an observatory and could identify the planets.
Since it was last minute, we didn't have that big of a group of monks. Many would walk by and someone would yell out what they could look at. We were able to see the moon, Jupiter and 4 moon, Mars, and Saturn and its rings! The monks asked many questions about the planets and moon, and many were excited by what they saw. In many ways it was like having American students look through telescopes - some of them tried taking pictures through the eyepiece with their cellphones.
One of our instructors had a nice camera and grabbed the tripod for it to do long-exposure photography. He got a number of nice pictures of the starts and planets by the monastery, the monks at the telescope, and a number of pictures of the instructors. There was some fun with long-exposure "light writing" as well.
Amazing, I got to use a portion of my Tibetan vocab. The days of the week are named after the planets, so I can name all of the objects we saw in Tibetan! I don't know if the Tibetans have names for the specific moons of Jupiter, but I barely know those in English.
We hope to get the telescope back out tomorrow evening, as it is the monks' day off and many will be around. I don't know if we will be lucky enough to have two clear nights in a row - the clouds did roll in today after we were out there about an hour. Hopefully the sky is clear for a bit tomorrow, and more monks are able to look through the telescope.
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