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A few brief notes from my experiences at this year's Riverside Telescope Maker's Conference...
As is often the case, the seeing was never more than fair on Friday evening. It had been quite gusty during the afternoon, so I didn't set up the solar scope, but the winds died down around 10 pm, allowing some observing time.
The real treat came on Saturday morning. I set up the h-alpha scope at 9 am, right after breakfast. It was clear from the start that this was going to be a good day for solar observing - I was reminded yet again of the benefits of 7000' of altitude. There was much detail, including magnetic field lines around the 2 sunspot groups, several large filaments including one running some 300k miles or so right over the limb (is this a filament/prominence?) Spicules were easily visible in the chromosphere, and several large prominences of various shapes around the limb. During the course of the day there were 4 or 5 small flares, lasting around 12-15 minutes each.
That evening the wind picked up at sunset, and kept getting worse. At 9pm I disassembled my mount in the midst of what was becoming a dust storm, packed everything into the van, and left.
It will probably take days to clean the dust and grit out of everything!
There was one other viewing treat this year - a triple star configuration I'd never seen before, a nearly perfect brilliant white star with sapphire blue companions on either side... Absolutely stunning!