They really had their hearts set on looking through the telescope. But Illinois in the spring being Illinois in the spring, there were no stars to be seen. For most of the week we couldn't even see the sun. I don't know what transparency you call it when you can't identify the sun. On the morning of their last day the sun came out. That was nature's cruel mockery.
But the sky was clear and we decided it worth a try so at 2:00 p.m. we decided to try for something, anything.
We opened the dome, fired up the C11 and told it to aim at the moon. We found it, but the sky was too bright to get many details. After fumbling around with several filters we settled on the red filter at 40x magnification. They were amazed! It was their first view. They saw craters and learned to use the controls. Then, just to see what we could see we swung the telescope around to Venus. I was nothing but a dot in the sky, but again they were amazed at what could be seen on a sunny day in the middle of the afternoon. They had to leave to catch their flight at 4:00 so we didn't have much time. As we closed everything up and headed out one of them told me how glad he was that we got to look through the telescope. He had wanted to all week, but thought he would not get to see through it. It turned out to be a great observing session in the middle of the afternoon on a sunny day in May.
