On Wednesday night, February 17th, Breno & I were to met Dennis and other CASF members at the observatory of the high school where he teaches, the Colégio Christus.

On the way to the school, we stopped at a restaurant to pick up Dennis, and briefly met one of the three teams representing the Paris Observatory.

Frederic Vachier (Observatório de Paris) , Dennis Weaver Lima (CASF/Observatório Astronômico Christus), Saulo Machado (GaeA), Bruce Berger (Amateur Telescope Makers of Boston), Felipe Braga Ribas (Observatório Nacional - ON), Breno Giacchini (REA/CEAMIG)

We made introductions and I thanked Felipe Ribas, a PhD with the National Observatory in Rio de Janeiro.  Felipe was responsible for getting our US team an invitation letter so that Matt Lockhart and I could get our academic visas. With Felipe was Frederic Vachier, with the Paris Observatory, and Saulo Machado from Grupo de Apoio em Eventos Astronomicos (Groups Supporting Astronomical Events) in Rio de Janeiro. Saulo was a volunteer like me and well known in Fortaleza. It was no more than 10 minutes between Hello and Goodbye as each team left for their night’s work.

This Escola Christus school houses close to 3,000 students and features a 5 meter dome on the roof, 5 stories high. Inside the huge dome, meant to host classroom sized crowds, was a 20cm home made Newtonian on a yoke mount.  It was a piece of beautiful craftsmanship and I regret that I did not get a good picture because we were pretty busy that night.

This amateur-made 20cm reflector in background and 25cm Meade SCT in the foreground, inside the dome on top of Colégio Christus.

We set up the Meade LX200 GPS right next to the Newtonian and Dennis tried to do a star alignment but clouds got in the way.  While he was busy with that, I set up the POETS camera, computer and GPS. A board had loosened up inside the computer during transport to Brazil, but after a while the problem was fixed and some test images using a C-mount lens were taken. But those cursed clouds remained during our practice session on Wednesday, and we were unable to find our target. Clouds would continue to be a problem throughout the expedition.

The next night there was lots of activity planned for the observatory. A news crew from Diario, the local newspaper and also Fortaleza TV showed up for interviews, photos and news footage. The Clube de Astronomia de Fortaleza, of which George Yure is President, has an active member that also works for Diario, Antonio Vettorazzi. The club is actively trying to recruit new members and to raise public awareness of the night skies, and their news appears frequently in the press.

George Yure, President of CASF

I was anxious to get started checking out the equipment and finding our target star, I breathed a sigh of relief that we had enough time before the crews arrived to at least get the equipment set up and the scope aligned. Just as we opened the dome for the latter the crews arrived, but clouds this night were even heavier than the past night, so the 90 minutes or so it would take for the interviews were not the limiting factor in our progress.

The TV reporter was surprisingly young but asked very good questions as she prepared up for the on-camera segment. Here’s a picture of me telling her about the tremendous hospitality my Brazilian host were showing, and why I had traveled so far to photograph just a one minute event.

Me in an interview with a Fortaleza TV Reporter.

Next came the newspaper reporters, asking some of the same questions. Though I plugged ATMoB several times, only my M.I.T. connection made it into the article. Jumping ahead a bit, here’s what the article looked like in the next morning’s paper.

Antonio Vettorazzo holding the February 19th issue of Diario Nordeste. Click image to go to the online article.

The clouds did not clear that night, so our elusive target remained unseen through our station 1 telescope.