April 18, 2009 - Jonathan Dickinson State Park Observing Session

We had a nice turnout for the Jonathan Dickinson Park observerving session last night (4/18) with 8 members with telescopes plus perhaps about a dozen visitors from the park and campgrounds scattered over the course of the evening.

The weather started out fine; the clouds had cleared and the wind had eased to a slight breeze. Bugs were not a problem. Most of us started with some very nice views of Saturn with its rings almost edge-on, then moved on to deep sky objects as the sky darkened. Around 9:15pm, as I was showing the open cluster M38 to a few attendees, new ASPB member Eric Isakoff looked in my eyepiece and said he didn't see anything. We looked up and saw that the sky was suddenly covered with thick, fast moving clouds. We waited about half an hour for the sky to clear, but it got worse and the wind picked up again. We felt a bit of a drizzle as I loaded the last pieces of gear into my car.

It was a short night, but at least we had over an hour of good viewing.

Jay Albert