Last night the TAC had a public star party on a school's athletic fields. This evidently got mentioned in the local newspapers and as a result, we had a *lot* of people out there. Fortunately, a bunch of astronmers with scopes showed up as well, something like 25-30. (My 8" SCT was one of the smaller scopes. The nearest neighbors to me were a 10" dob. and an 18" reflector).

We may have had more people coming to view than visible stars in the sky (there was a fair amount of light pollution, this being effectively in the center of a large city). It was crowded. Even though I was on the fringes and had the runt scope of the litter, there were 6 to 8 in line for most of the time. The vast majority were families with children in the 4 to 10 age range. Everyone started off wanting to see Hale-Bopp, of course. Bringing binocs. as well as a scope turned out to be the right thing to do. I had people look through the binocs for a wider angle view before taking a look through the scope. I set up at 156X; this allowed a good view of the hoods, but wasn't so high a mag. that constant readjustment to center the view was necessary (no motors on my scope). This elicited a substantial numbers of oohs and ahhhs, and quite a few questions about why the hoods exist, why they are semicircular, how fast the comet moves, how big is it, what's it made of, etc. Brush up on your comet knowledge; you're going to be asked about everything to do with them!

Interest waned in Hale-Bopp after the first hour. Since the other scopes were showing the "old favorites" like M42, I put my diffraction grating on and was showing people the differences in the spectra of stars, using Betelgeuse and Rigel as examples. They got a little lecture on how light gets emitted and absorbed, etc. People were amazed to hear and see that every star has a unique spectrum, or as one little boy piped up, "every star has its own rainbow!" (A line I stole and started using on everyone else who came along later). This worked very well, especially as the scopes in my vicinity all set up each on a different object. New wonders at every station.

About that time you'd expect parents to want to get the little ones home for bed, the crowds vanished and scopes started packing up. Whew! Tiring. Standing and lecturing for almost 2 hours straight can wear you down. Never did manage to sneak off and ogle the other scopes, either.