Late breaking news I heard last night: a new set of spectra of Hale-Bopp were recently taken, and have revealed a previously unsuspected compound in the comet's head: phenobarbital. (ta-dum!)

The Foothill show went surprisingly well. I'd been dreading it all week, after reading Monday that the previous week's show attracted 500 visitors. This Friday attracted a similar number, but everyone was polite and seemed to enjoy themselves.

A few helpful PAS members set up small 'scopes outside the dome and answered questions from the people standing in line to get into the observatory. Inside the dome, we wondered why no one was asking any questions or exhibiting any reactions; apparently they'd already had all their questions answered by the people outside. A few people asked about seeing the two tails, and most were able to discern the split after I told them what to look for (only the beginning of the tail was visible in the roughly 80x view through the 16", but there was a definite darker patch which signalled the beginning of the split, which most people were able to see once it was described to them). Almost nobody asked about the hoods, surprisingly. The most common question was "Why is it so fuzzy?"

Craig Cholar's posted info on the early Mir pass was a big hit among the people standing in line outside (we couldn't see it inside the northwest-pointing dome, of course).

The worst part of the evening was when Hale-Bopp set. It set slowly into tree branches, so the view degraded gradually. At the end, it was barely visible as a dim splotch -- picture M51 in a 4.5" -- but people still wanted to see it. We kept trying to talk people into letting us swing over to Mars, but the crowd objected. Finally, someone admitted to not being able to see anything at all, and let us move to Mars. Immediately the crowd dispersed, leaving only a handful of people to look at the nice view of Mars in the 6" refractor. I was impressed at how instantly the seeing on Mars improved when the heat-generating crowds left the dome. I'd never seen such a graphic demonstration of why roll-off roofs are preferable.

Once everyone had looked at Mars and we'd talked about what there was to see there about the differences between reflectors and refractors, someone asked about satellite passes, and I checked the printout I had made and discovered that we were due for a NOSS pass in seven minutes. So the four of us trooped outside, I grabbed my spare binoculars and passed them around, and we watched Auriga. Sure enough, all three NOSS satellites were quite visible in binoculars (though quite invisible to the naked eye from our location). This was the first time I'd seen all three myself -- a very strange sight -- and watching them fade out one by one was interesting.

Tonight is another public show at Foothill, complete with several guest speakers and lots of telescopes. I told the unfortunate people who'd waited in line but hadn't made it before the comet set to come back on Saturday night, when there will be a video camera set up on the 16", and the larger number of small telescopes set up in the parking lot will guarantee that everyone can get a look.