When we arrived we were surprised to see that we were allocated a painted square plot without any tables or chairs. We set up the society’s gazebo and had to cobble together tables from some of the members, luckily most members attending had their own folding chairs, there were enough to go around. Once we had tables, we set out the display boards, magazines and leaflets.

Almost set up and ready to go

We set up two solar scopes (the H-alpha PST and the ETX75 with white light solar filter), Tony brought along his Dobsonian so that people could see the workings of a reflecting telescope and Gavin brought along his Celestron C8 and a Newtonian on a GEM with a Mylar solar filter. Nobody had brought along a hand compass but Bob’s car has a compass fitted, so after some improvisation, aligning the car North-South and using a length of rope to transfer the alignment over to the Celestron, Venus was found and tracked.

Bob and Gavin aligning the Celestron without the aid of the stars

Dave brought along his radio meteor detector but this never gave any results and was abandoned, while being powered from a generator there was an electrical earthing problem that stopped the signal being sent from the radio receiver to the laptop with the signal analysis software.

Dave explaining how a reflecting telescope works

The weather was very warm with broken cloud so observing Venus and the Sun was an on-again/off-again activity. The gate opened to the public at 10:00 and things started slowly with just a few visitors but this picked up after lunchtime and we had queues of people lined up to look through the telescopes, most were very impressed to see the gibbous phase of Venus during the daytime and to see the Sun through a telescope, in both white light and especially H-alpha. At least one body was visible most of the time although some people had to wait for the clouds to clear or returned late to see the sights.

Queues of people waiting to see Venus and the Sun

We were able to help some people with questions they had about using their own telescopes, what to look at and how to find things in the night sky. There was only one brief encounter with an astrologer who, of course, knew more about the universe than any of us.

People of all sizes were looking through the telescopes, probably for the first time

Most of us were ‘touched’ by the ruthless power of the Sun and got pinker as the hours passed and quite red by the time the gates closed at 17:00, but the response of the public kept us going throughout the day. We met and spoke to a lot of people and gave out most of our business cards and membership forms, so we felt that the day had been a success and worth while for us and the visitors that we had seen. We packed away and those that were not too worn out went for a Mexican to relax and reflect on the day’s events.

Many more photes of this event in the Photo Galleries under Club Photos