04/16/2004 2330 UTC

Tonight I did my first star party. It was at the Pyne/Arts Magnet School in Lowell. I had the smallest scope in the set-up (there were six telescopes operating, including one where the GUIDE scope was an ETX90 OTA). But given the conditions, my little scope performed quite well, giving good views of Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, M42, M45 and Mizar.

There were about 50 people besides the ATMoB club members there. Everybody had a good time and I got a number of interesting questions. We actually started a little early given the time of year -- the sky wasn't really dark enough for anything except Venus when we started getting kids at 7:30 PM. But when we called it a wrap at 9:30, the sky wasn't too bad. Light polluted, of course -- the school is on the south-eastern border of Lowell and there was light all around from shopping malls, businesses and homes in the area, but not a lot of local light to be bothersome (just one flood on the school building itself, which was about due north of where I'd set up.

This page copyright (c) 2003 - 2004 by David A. Wallace.