Here's is Sean and a couple of visitors looking through the telescopes. A few people he knew from work dropped by and observed briefly. The girls in this picture were enjoyable to talk with and provided some great comedy relief at times. About the only thing that would be distracting to an astronomy purist was an occasional flash from the camera the girls had with them. I didn't have time to research and show them how to do a time exposure on their camera. We really didn't have time to go into to many technical details.
The weather was awesome, a slight breeze, perfect temperatures and few bugs. Almost textbook weather you think about when you're young and wanting to stay out all night to just lie down on a blanket and summer camp looking at the stars or for meteors. We saw a few meteors and more than one satellite pass through the field of view of various telescopes.
The girls likely didn't see any satellites through an eyepiece, they looked at the targets rather quickly and then would make comments and joke around a bit with us.
All in all a fun time. The site had some lights that were a distraction for dark ground viewing. With the larger low powered Plossl eyepieces at times I would see reflections from ground lighting, not much you could do to combat that, perhaps setup with your car blocking some ground lights and adjust the height of your tripod. The vistas were amazing. A really nice low horizon, just what you'd want from a nice observing site. I wanted to try to get a shot of the Milky Way, but the moon was bright and in that area and I was running out of time as it set.
Driving back across the free bridge to Trenton, the moon hung brightly between the large chimneys of the local coal burning power plant. I wish I had my camera ready and had a shot of that.
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