Once again dark skies were the rule at Topsail Hill State Park. With several telescopes available and even more club members, we were able to keep the light turnout busy going from scope to scope. We handed out a number of Evening Sky Maps provided by skymaps.com and both Tom and Ken had examples of their astrophotography on display.
Starting with comet Garradd, the guest astronomers got to see quite a number of visible targets including the Ring Nebula, several open and globular star clusters and ultimately Jupiter when it finally cleared the tree line. Early on, the Milky Way was plainly visible but the sky hazed up a little later in the evening but did not put a damper on the event.
We had discussions with our contact at the state park on additional methods for advertising the Sky Views and we will try those for the next Topsail event on the 27th of October.