4 Occtober 2014

I just got home from the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum's Astronomy Night public observing night. There were very few telescopes there. I think four at any one time. And at the end of the night the museum's organizer said he had been told that 700 visitors went through the turnstiles. It didn't seem like there were that many people up on the flight deck but since it was a little cool with a breeze that made it chilly up there some people may have opted for just the indoor activities down on the hanger deck. Most of the night all of the telescopes were pointed at the Moon. When it started moving close to the carrier's island I switched to Alberio. I was told by several people early on that I had the best view of the Moon out of all of the telescopes in operation at the time--two refractors and another catadioptric. At the time there were long lines at all of the scopes so I didn't get a chance to look through any of the optics to make my own comparison. It might be that I was viewing at 25x, which I normally do at piblic events because I find focus to be easiest to achieve and the observer can move into and out of the eyepiece to fine tune focus if they need to, and the others might have been using more power.