Happy Father's day. . . we may be open briefly when it gets dark out tonight

There's a slight chance I'll open up the observatory tonight.   It depends on the weather and how my day goes.  Today is Father's day.  We opened up the observatory and I didn't make an announcement because some members of the club seemed interested in observing and I thought we might have a fairly good turnout.  I also met a few people while out and about during the day Saturday and mentioned to them that the observatory would be open.  None of the public showed up.

Today the skies may be fairly clear.  Last night the skies were plagued with high altitude clouds after 11:20PM and maybe even a bit earlier.  We saw good detail in the surface of Mars and saw Saturn as well with fairly good detail.   We actually had three key keepers and two FAAC astronomers out last night.  We spent much of the time talking about astronomy and listened to several good stories from different members about different topics, like the Messier list and the history of it.  We also looked at Tim Campbell's Flickr photograph page and he showed us some photos and discussed some photography techniques he used.  It was a pretty nice and easy going time at the observatory.

Tim Dey, Tim Campbell, Dan Barriball, Greg Knekleian (me) and Joe Bostic was out at the observatory.  I arrived a bit late at 10PM, but Tim Campbell had the observatory already open as he is one of the key keepers, and also our Ford Amateur Astronomy Club president.   We had a pretty good time and the mosquitoes didn't bother us to much.   Temperatures were a bit on the chilly side and there were a lot of fireworks being set off by locals and at least a half dozen Chinese lanterns being launched locally, while we had the observatory open.

I left at 11:45PM and ran some errands.  I think the observatory closed around midnight.  I took a picture of the moon as it was rising, one day after being a full moon.   The moon lit up the sky quite a bit once it was rising and the clouds started to cover and move in from the north.  We also saw the International Space Station fly overhead.  It actually flew well north below Polaris and toward Detroit's eastern shoreline.  It disappeared in the trees as it grew a bit dimmer.   We saw the ISS with a couple of pairs of binoculars.  We only noticed it during part of it's flight over the horizon and it was out for a couple of minutes while we looked at it with binoculars.

Greg