I'll second Dave's enthusiasm. What a crowd! A surprisingly enthusiastic sun party, no doubt due in part to seeing Dave's large(r than most people have seen) scope set up. I was mad at myself for not getting some filters ready ahead of time for the binos. I took the binocular mount Chuck so expertly made for me and had a lot of interest in that as well -- took 3 orders from total strangers in fact (I'll mail you those offline Chuck); the mount performs like a dream. If any of you are even thinking of a binocular mount, Chuck's $30 kit is a steal! Nice hint for a Father's day gift to drop on the spousal unit... ;-) Rich --- David Moulton <dmoulton@myrealbox.com> wrote:
The Eclipse party at the Utah County Harmon's went well. I would guess around 300 showed up. They had been advertising it at the cash registers most of last week, along with it appearing in the Daily Herald (thanks to Paul). The store manager told me that there were 1300 cookies and 25 gallons of punch consumed. There were lots of 'ooos' and 'aaahs' that make it all worth it.
I had my 9 1/4" SCT there, and Paul Witte had his ETX as well. Rich & Deb thankfully came with a naked eye filter or two. Someone, not in the club, was cutting up 5 1/4" floppies to look through. I wasn't too thrilled about that, but couldn't do much about it. Someone else I was not familiar with was projecting it with a small scope onto a small projector screen.
Nobody seemed to notice that my scope was stopped down to a couple of inches with the filter, and so Paul's was bigger. I had to constantly tell folks to get in line for the other scope. Many of them didn't believe me that 'size doesn't matter'.
I just happened to be looking through the scope when one of the spots emerged from the shadow. I did see a small white ring around it at the last moment. At first it looked as if the moon had a rather large mountain range I was unaware of.
Lots of fun. I was still showing sunspots to stragglers for half an hour.
dave
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