It was not a huge crowd, Frank W. with his binocular set up, Mike K. with his 8″ Schmidt Cassegrain telescope, new members Greg B. with his 12″ goto dob and Gary S. with one of the club’s 8″ loaner dobs.  Additionally I counted 7 guests.  I may be missing a few folks so my sincerest apologies.  There was not a cloud in the sky and the seeing was not as bad as predicted, however the transparency seemed lower than predicted as it was hard to pull in details of some deeper sky objects that normally are decent targets from Big Woods (i.e. the Leo Triplet, M51 and the M81/M82 pair).  The wind did kick up every now and then but it was nowhere near as bad as expected.  An occasional wind gust would shake the telescope tube but overall it was not a hindrance for viewing.

The Orion Nebula was a nice first target we shared with many of our guests.  One group of guests, a father and his 2 young sons, brought out their 60mm refractor.  We had a little mini-telescope tune up session there in the field.  Many of the guests were quite interested in the difference between my 8″ SCT and Greg’s 12″ goto dob.  We spent quite a bit of time explaining the differences and comparing views of similar objects like the Eskimo nebula, open clusters and some double stars.  Additionally Frank treated us to some amazing wide field views through his Swarovski binoculars.  We were all impressed with the quality and versatility of his setup.

As the night wore on, it was just Greg, Gary and me.  Greg showed off his NexImage while capturing some images of Saturn.  However the wind did present some difficulties.  We finally packed up around 12:30am but not before we grabbed a quick view of M13 which was only about 20 degrees above the horizon and pretty much buried in a soup of haze.