Friday was a good night for public access astronomy. The Trailside park session was with the Utah Skies group. They asked for help with an army of third graders. The site is closer to Salt Lake than the Gravel Quarry and is as good an urban dark site as Stansbury Park. My reading of the satellite weather maps said that the clouds should start clearing at 8:00 PM. So we had to do some cloud dodging before the third graders left for bedtime. Lucky it wasn’t a school night so we had plenty of customers on up to 10:00 PM. These short nights with a young enthusiastic audience are my favorite kind of star party. . Started out looking at M11, which is my favorite not-quite dark-enough dark sky object. I can fix it with a Telrad as soon as the tail star of Aquila becomes visible. M11 is a wide and dense open cluster with three prominent red giants and it sits in the dense Scutum star cloud, which gives it a rich background of very dim stars. When the clouds covered M11 I went to NGC457, the E.T. cluster. This has fewer stars on a less rich star field Not as good as M11 but a good parking spot until the Perseus Double cluster peeks through the clouds. The double cluster always draws a “wow’s” from the viewers. Parked on Polaris for a while to show viewers an easy double star. Also this let me take a break from tracking. This raised a call for “more double stars, Please”. These people are so polite. So as the peeked out of the clouds, we went to eta and iota Cassiopeia, Almaak, and Alberio. I wanted a galaxy but M31 wouldn’t uncover from the clouds. So I went to Mirach and Mirach’s ghost, NGC 404. This is a pretty red bright star right next to a faint fuzzy galaxy. Later we say M31 with dust lanes, M32 and M110. For Globular clusters, I hit M2, M13, and M56 as they uncovered from the clouds. Then there was a call for Planetary nebulae. So I hit M57 the Ring, M27 the Dumbbell, NGC6543 the Cat’s Eye, and NGC7009 the Saturn Nebula. The clouds were leaving but a gusty wind was picking up when I broke down at 10:30 PM. I mingled with some of the Utah Skies club members. They were laughing about the antics of the tinfoil hat faction of their club. It’s a problem common to many astronomy clubs. It guess I would rather have an earnest debate with a four year old about black holes, than an earnest lecture from an adult who thinks that the U.S. State Department has established relations with 7 different extra-terrestrial civilizations. At least the 4 year old is still exercising critical thinking. DT _______________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Declare Yourself - Register online to vote today! http://vote.yahoo.com