We had a large group show up at the park last night, I counted 16 cars. the conditions where good even if the dew was heavy . Great views of Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn, as well as many deep space objects. All attending said they enjoyed themselves. Two people sent me some photos to post here.  It was fun to get back out to the park after such a long stretch of bad weather, lets hope we can get the park opened more often in the future.

these two photos by Tim Philp.

Here are a couple of images taken by David Gilbraith. with info on the mosaic. All images were taken around 9:30 PM. Mars (in the south), Jupiter (in the west), and Saturn (in the east) imaged with a Meade 125mm Maksutov-Cassegrain telescope, recorded with a Nikon D800 body at prime focus. Each planetary image was a single exposure, with the Galilean moons of Jupiter taken from a fourth, overexposed frame. The images were processed and the mozaic assembled with Paint.NET, free photo management software. The moons look a little bigger than they should relative to Jupiter as a result of the over-exposure to pick them up, and perhaps also the dewy. The images as put together here are a mozaic with the planets being the size they were recorded by the camera, so this is their relative size as disks as view from earth last night. The disk of Jupiter was captured at ISO 500 at 1/125th of a second. The Galilean moons were shot at 1/20 of a second, as was Mars and Saturn. From top to bottom the Galilean moons here are Ganymede, Io, Callisto, and Europa. 

   Messier 5 from last night, too – a 15 second exposure at ISO 6400.

I finally downloaded my photos from Sat. night hear are a few.

Mario in red light