For the Canada Day weekend, my wife and I headed off to Pinery Provincial Park with 18 friends for camping. Most of these folks had never camped before because they were fairly new visitors from China, where camping is virtually unheard of. They had also never looked into a telescope eyepiece before. On Sunday night I set up my 8″ Dob on the campsite as dusk deepened and the nearly first quarter moon shone crisply high in the west. I felt like an ambassador to the stars as a queue quickly formed and my Chinese friends glanced at a sight they had never seen before. They were impressed. As the sky got increasingly darker, Jupiter was peeking conveniently through the trees, so we checked out the 4 Galilean moons lined up on one side according to their distance from the planet. Some of the campers could detect faint bands on the planet surface, others could not. My experience as an English as a Second Language teacher paid off as I was able to answer some questions in a way that most could understand. One woman had only been in Canada for a few weeks, and so had to have my answers translated.

Then we had our campfire, playing games, singing, and telling stories until after midnight. At around 12:45 a.m., ten of us headed down to the shore of Lake Huron in the dark, following a trail through the woods and across sand dunes, some holding flashlights, some with lawn chairs or telescope parts. I carried my telescope’s optical tube, stepping cautiously over the occasional tree trunk and down sandy wooden steps in the deep dark with the light of flashlights flickering in front of my feet. Once at the beach we took in the summer night sky, which was hazy, but much darker than is possible in Hamilton. After our eyes had adjusted a bit to the dark, we checked out Jupiter again, now low in the southwest. Lyra was high overhead, so we observed the ghostly smoke ring of the Ring Nebula, M57. Not far away and also close to the zenith was M13 in Hercules. Finally at around 1:30 we checked out the Andromeda Galaxy, now rising in the northeast. The biggest ‘wow factor’ came from the Hercules globular cluster, which for many was the highlight of the star party.

We had an early wake up call the next morning in order to pack our tents and our gear for the drive back to Hamilton, so it was time to make our way back to the campsite. What a great way to cap off a weekend of adventure at the Pinery!