This year’s event was early in the month in an effort to minimise the effect of moonlight.  Conditions on the evening were encouraging with cloud forecast to clear away to the south.  This turned out to be the case, but was painfully slow so that the moon and Saturn were initially obscured.

With four scopes deployed in good time, interest from the campsite was considerable and a sizeable crowd waited for darkness or the moon and Saturn to appear.  This allowed time for Mark to demonstrate the scale solar system, with help from the audience, who were keen to assist.  Eventually the moons face was uncovered, before Saturn emerged from the edge of the stubborn cloud bank.  Both objects drew gasps of delight.  Given the moonlight, deep sky objects were not at their best, but our usual menu of targets still seemed to flame the curiosity of those at the eyepiece.

Around 22:00h the event slowly wound down as expected cloud started to encroach from the NW, though as we had pretty much seen what we set out to show, we were quite happy with our evenings work.