I opened the gate about 5:15 pm and there were only 4 or 5 cars waiting to get in probably because the day had been very cloudy. But the sky was clearing and by the end of the evening, we had 16 cars come out to the star party and we counted 20 people.

Jupiter was the first object that became visible and we could see the two belts clearly along with the 4 Galilean moons, but Io quickly passed out of view behind the big planet.

We had young astronomer Kyle show up early with his mom & dad and they had fun finding objects in their new telescope. I thought their view of the Orion Nebula was great as it showed the Trapezium stars clearly.

Tiffany set up her Celestron next to us and proceeded to find all the Messier objects her college homework had required. Sam set up a bit farther away and Jim used the middle picnic table to set up his table top scope to show his grandkids objects like Jupiter.

Don and Ves set up scopes near their cars just past the 2nd gate and I was impressed with the video views of M81 and M82 that Don was showing. Later I was able to find M81 but not M82 after it got too cloudy. Martin and his guest set up his big LX90 on a wedge mount.

Others that came out were Kevin, Eric, Butch and Caroline (no scope).

It seemed colder than the 49 F temperature when a slight wind came up and the clouds did make viewing objects, especially galaxies rather difficult. We waited too long to look for Uranus but did find both big Asteroids Ceres & Vesta. The Behive (M44) was brilliant while M40 was boring and we never could find M3.

We were able to close the gate at 11 pm after the last person shut down and went home.

Steve & Bonnie