The skies at sunset had me nervous. The 4% cloud cover predicted earlier in the day turned out closer to 40%. However, chief HAL meteorologist, Marc Feuerberg, predicted the clouds would dissipate shortly after sunset and so they did! Seeing could have been a bit better but the clouds were not an issue.

The Ganymede transit was well along when it was finally dark enough to locate Jupiter. As Chris Todd noted, almost everyone's scope had good views of the event. David Stein was processing images in near real-time on his laptop using Registax. He got some great images that I hope we can post on the HAL website soon. The HAL video system got some decent shots of the transit but the image didn't really get fine tuned until the transit was over. James Willingham took Jupiter photos from the video monitor along with later photos of several Messier objects once we switched to the StellaCam. All these images are posted in the HAL Photo Gallery in the PlanetCam-StellaCam section. (First 5 images in that gallery) http://www.howardastro.org/gallery/

There were about 20 scopes and 30 members and visitors present. We had some first time members and some old members present as well. (We won't mention how old!)

Chas Rimpo
7/7 Star Party Host

Photos Compliments of Chas Rimpo & James Willinghan