It was a long night last night. Immediately after work, Minesh, Laura, two of Laura's summer students, and I drove up to the ski area and hiked up the Mother Lift route to Pajarito's summit as Rainier Training Climb #5. On the way back from Pajarito, I got a call from one of the El Valle Astronomers asking if I could help out with a dark night for 40 high school kids that night. So I drove straight to El RIto, grabbing fast food on the way in order to make it in time for sunset.

Dan and Lee were there with their 17" Dobsonians, and I ran the 16" SCT in the dome. The sky was clear up until sunset, then it clouded up pretty badly. The theme of the evening was trying to get the scopes pointed quickly enough that the object was visible by a few kids before it went behind a cloud again. It was a pain, and the Dobs had a huge advantage in this sort of environment, but I still managed to pull off good views of Venus, Saturn, Jupiter & moons, the great globular cluster in Hercules, the Whirlpool Galaxy, and the Sombrero Galaxy. Of the 40 kids, about half of them didn't really care. But the other half were really into it and they had a great time. Eventually, their teachers had to pull them away from the scopes and leave at about 11:30pm. Of course, the sky cleared up completely as soon as they were all gone.

Anyway, it was great to see kids getting excited about science, etc. And of course there were the odd comments that only high school kids can make:

* after looking at M13, a giant globular cluster: "Can we send a monkey there?"
* after looking at Venus: "I thought we were going to look at space."
* "Do you think we will be dead in 100 years?" (after a clarifying discussion, it turns out he was asking about global warming.)
* "We're rappers; you should pick up our album next time you're in Espanola." This was followed by a prolonged discussion between the four "members" of the "crew" as to what their group's name was.

SPACE!!