June 7, 2008 Cub Scouts at Cuivre River S.P.
As we had two events on the same night, we split forces at Klondike and Cuivre River. Marvin Stewart and I took Cuivre River, knowing that Klondike was in good hands.
The skies were great on this Saturday night, but the clearing was fairly small. We started setting up our two scopes on the paved turn-around at the end of the road in the camping site. As we did, several kids on bikes became very interested in what we were doing. Some mentioned that they had been to some of our previous events at Klondike and Brommelsiek.
The kids were anxious, and we started entertaining as soon as we got set up around 8:20, showing them the moon even before the sun had set! As it got a bit darker, we started showing them Saturn and Mars. The kids were then summoned for a talk before we “officially” began. After that, we continued showing Saturn (until it was lost in the trees) as well as M3, M13, M4, M57, M51, M27, M81/82, Albireo, and more.
We took a 3 minute “time-out” to watch the ISS flyby (with the Space Shuttle attached), which was the “big event” of this outing.
Most of the kids left for “story time” around 10:30, but a few adults spent a lot of time with us getting views of the deeper objects. After story time, a few more adults and some of the kids came back for “seconds” and got to see the galaxies and the “Boy Scout Star” (Albireo). The night was just getting perfect (the moon had set) around 12:30am, but without a campsite for us we decided to pack in it and get home. The stragglers who were camping hung in with us until we pulled the plug.
Our hosts were great to us, providing bottled water and even ice cream (from story time)! I think we all had a great time and we really enjoyed the nice clear skies that had been so rare during the past several rainy months.
Jim T.
