Rob: Thank you. Very well put on all accounts. Glad to hear reports on how well things went as a convention as well as the great weather. Siegfried can tell you that I personally was responsible for the great clear, steady and transparent skies by staying home. Glad I could help out.Steve
From: robtaylorslc@gmail.com To: utah-astronomy@mailman.xmission.com Date: Tue, 5 Jul 2011 11:23:44 -0600 Subject: Re: [Utah-astronomy] Bryce times
I would like to remind everyone that this an open Bulletin Board and this is probably NOT a good place to talk about, gripe, complain about any individual, I.E.: Richard. Richard has his job to do and he tries to do it with humor and efficiency and generally does a good job and goes out of his way to take our needs into consideration within his job description. Considering this group and its many personalities he does a good job.
Minor correction. The public star party was in the parking lot adjacent to the Bryce Visitor Center, not the Lodge. That's our usual spot. There were smaller ALCON groups observing, unofficially, at other sites including at Bryce Point but these were not organized by us. The Park is a 24/7 operation and the public, that would also be any ALCON participant, are welcome to set up Telescopes within the park but may not restrict the normal flow of visitors in any way.
I do believe there was an incident where some people that were in an ad hoc star party asked/insisted some people visiting the overlook turn off their head lights and apparently it wasn't handled well by anyone involved, I don't know all the details. We tried to remind everyone that we cannot ask anyone to turn off their light outside of the two places we had special permission to be there, Rainbow Point and the Visitor Center overflow parking lot. Considering the number of people and the number of telescopes I thought things went very well other than that we needed more observing space, the two sites we had were not enough for the crowd of cars, scopes and attendees.
ALCON was a great event and something SLAS should be proud of pulling off. I'm not sure there are too many other Astronomy Clubs that could have done what we did. There were a lot of logistics involved and things went surprisingly well. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised but with something that big I expected more problems and they simply weren't there. I think we will see some good press in coming months. Lowell got a very nice award at the end and it was very well deserved.
Bob
-----Original Message----- From: utah-astronomy-bounces@mailman.xmission.com [mailto:utah-astronomy-bounces@mailman.xmission.com] On Behalf Of Joe Bauman Sent: Monday, July 04, 2011 9:51 PM To: Utah Astronomy Subject: Re: [Utah-astronomy] Bryce times
Hi Erik, There was a public star party across from Bryce Lodge and an official private star party at Rainbow Point, for which the NPS had issued a permit. I don't think there was an official star party of any kind at Bryce Point (unless that's the same place as the public one, but I doubt that). If someone there threatened a visitor, that was really bad behavior and I'm sorry it happened. Thanks for the clarification. -- Joe
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