Come use our telescopes to see the planets Mars and Saturn, the Orion Nebula and star clusters. Listen to a lecture entitled "The Cosmic Microwave Background: Primordial Radiation Left Over From the Big Bang". Night Sky Maps will be given out so you can learn to locate your favorite constellations. 

Visitor Nights are open to the public so feel free to forward this message along to friends and neighbors who may be interested. Visitor Nights are free of charge, and no reservations are required. They are fun for the entire family -- children, teens, parents and grandparents. Please remember to dress warmly and bring along flashlights. For this special event, we will have portable bathrooms on site. We heartily encourage amateur astronomers to bring along their own telescopes to share with our visitors.

The Observatory is located on the campus of the University of California, Irvine. Driving directions can be found at http://www.physics.uci.edu/~observat/visnite_driving_directions.html. Visitors should park in the ICS/Engineering Structure at the corner of E. Peltason and Anteater Drives, which is labeled 18C on the campus map found at http://www.uci.edu/campusmap. That website also provides larger scale maps and directions from the freeways to campus. A $7 parking fee must be paid at parking structure. We will have shuttle buses to transport you from the parking structure to entrance of the gravel road that leads to the Observatory, which located near the intersection of Gabrielino Dr. and California Ave. A five minute long walk down a dirt/gravel road will bring you to the Observatory.

Shuttles will cycle between the parking structure and Observatory road every 10 minutes from 6:30 to 8:00 and  9:00 to 9:30 pm, and intermittently in between. The lecture will begin at 7:15 pm and again at 8:15 pm.

Note that parking is not allowed on the streets in the University Hills neighborhood where the Observatory is located. Only cars transporting telescope equipment or a handicapped person will be permitted to drive on the road leading out to the Observatory for safety reasons (see our web site for specific driving instructions). We kindly ask that you be considerate of our neighbors and keep noise to a minimum to avoid disturbing the residents, some of whom are young children that go to bed early.

In the event of rain, Visitor Night may be be canceled. If so, a cancellation notice will be posted on our website by 3 pm that day. However, if it is cloudy but not raining, Visitor Night probably will go on and you can still tour the Observatory dome and listen to the lecture.

The UCI Observatory is operated by the Department of Physics & Astronomy, and Visitor Nights are funded by the School of Physical Sciences. For more information on the Observatory, see our website at http://www.physics.uci.edu/~observat .  A poster advertising Visitor Night can be found at http://www.physics.uci.edu/~observat/visnite.html . If you would like to be added to our email list to receive notices of future Visitor Nights, please send an email to outreach@sculptor.ps.uci.edu with a subject line that says "subscribe".

Sincerely,

Tammy Smecker-Hane

Director, UCI Observatory
Associate Professor, Department of Physics & Astronomy