When we arrived about 6:45 pm there were 10 cars waiting at the gate. The sun was slowly heading down over the hills and the sky was pretty clear. Temperature had dropped to 60 degrees.

The first pass of the ISS (International Space Station) at 8 pm was impressive as it crossed the entire sky shining at a bright magnitude -2.5. Then I was able to give a night sky tour and at 9:15 we saw the Hubble Space Telescope make a dim magnitude 2.7 pass. Later we saw a magnitude -0.4 a second pass of the ISS.

Tiffany set up her Meade 8″ Loaner scope and started looking for all the objects her astronomy class homework required. Jonathan & Jennifer set up their 8″ Celestron and showed us a great view of M42.

We all had great views of Jupiter and the 4 Galilean moons and even Saturn later when it rose above the hills. We were only able to see moon Titan as by then, dew was becoming a factor. Prior to that, we did locate asteroids Ceres and Vesta and the Leo galaxy triplet, although I was not able to see NGC 3628. M65 & M66 were very dim.

Rob McKenzie shared great views of the Beehive cluster and Saturn through his 5″ refractor. We had 20 cars some out to this star party and 30 people had a good time.

We closed the gate at 11 pm after the last person shut down and felt we had another successful star party.

Steve & Bonnie