Sorry about the lack of posts about observing.

I've been very busy with two parents who are I'll for the past month. Caring for two people is can be a little stressful and keeps a person pretty busy.

Because of this much of the activity at HJRO has been by others and I have not been involved much with the astronomy club lately.

We have another person who can open up the observatory, but the current key keepers have much less time to open up the observatory due to their other commitments/jobs which keep them busy.

I was at about 90 percent of the openings of HJRO in the past couple of years. It may be a while before I can be more active with the observatory and many astronomy sessions due to the family health needs I'm dealing with.

I've quickly met a couple of other members or briefly observed at home in the past month. Haven't had much time to observe.

I hope that the session to observe the conjunction of planets in Alen park goes well around memorial day weekend, if that happens. I'm not sure I'll be able to be there as a brief visitor, much less take part in setting up many of my telescope options.

In any event the telescopes I have that would show the three planets together are small grab and go telescopes, so I might be able to show up and briefly setup and do some observing or let other Faac members use my telescopes to observe that event. We will have to see what happens.

As far as HJRO and the school system, I'm a bit disappointed that I can't offer my time to help the kids see some solar observing. My time is really limited right now and HJRO observatory is being reconfigured with more equipment. That reconfiguration could interfere with the ability to show the sky and do solar for the kids, but hopefully that will quickly happen.

HJRO will be getting a new telescope ring setup, which will allow the telescope to be mounted to the telescope mount with a much better and rigid setup. The rings are being donated by George Korody, who is one of the main faac members responsible for the setting up and rebirth of the hjr observatory at Lincoln Park.

In any event I may write more, but find it really difficult to announce and plan any observing events. I'm literally working or up about 18 hours per day with maybe four or five hours sleep at night lately. Needless to say this affects and wears me out as well and makes any spare time in the day a candidate for a cat nap rather than a time to plan to observe. And since demands are random and unplanned, it's almost impossible to block off any time and commit to observe or have the observatory open.

Right now the moon is out and I may head out and do a quick observe of it from my yard before heading to bed or perhaps helping others here get to bed.

There are far more important things happening right now than astronomy for me so I'm just going to have to sit on the sidelines forma while.

Greg
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