Halloween Observing
By John Pierce

Me and another SCAC member (Jim Bricken) setup in downtown Felton at the Community Center. We had lines all night long. Since Felton has no lit residential areas, everyone comes downtown and the merchants supply the treats... So its quite a town party... There was some sort of dance going on in the community center...

Mostly Jim had Jupiter in his Meade 10" dob, and I had Saturn in my Celestar 8 at around 160X. Folks were agawk and amazed ("That real? You SURE you don't have a picture in there??? WOW!!"). Not sure who liked it more, the kids or the parents. I forgot a stool so the shorter kids had trouble reaching the eyepiece, but it worked out pretty well.

Jim has done this for a few years, mentioned at our last club meeting that the lines were getting sort of long and begged for backup, so I hauled the family along, set the wife and kids loose trick-er-treating...

Only one real drawback... I think my 12.5mm Ultima has mascara on it (I realized its short eyerelief was a problem with all the face paints etc, so switched to my cheap 25mm SMA plus barlow to get more eye relief...) Heh. But, considering the crowds, folks treated the equipment with a good deal of respect, lots of questions were asked, folks were intrigued. Jim had a big box of neat posters and flyers and stuff from Nasa Ames (where he works) to hand out. I only had one or two mid-sized kids try and grab the eyepiece like a handle...