Eastside Astronomical Society: promoting interest in astronomy to Seattle's eastside community

Finally! We get lucky after months of trying to have some kind of public viewing event. We were almost certain for about a week that this would again become one of our disappointing "Star party cancellation" events which have become expected over the last year.

Anyone else notice that most of 2007 and so far in 2008 has been pretty lousy for this hobby?
Anyway, skies were clear all day, then clouds moved in again later in the afternoon, but satellite images looked promising so we stuck with it and didn't cancel. We planned this event just down the street from EAS president Tom's house at Highlands Park in the Renton Highlands neighborhood. Or usual location in Bellevue didn't have a very good eastern view of the sky, and the moon was starting it's show as it rose above the horizon in the eastern skies.
Skies had a broken layer of clouds to the east when the moon came up, but looking westward we could tell that there was a big clearing that was slowly creeping east. About 20 minutes into totality, the skies

cleared around the moon and the dark red orb showed up clearly in the sky just below Regulus in the constellation of Leo, and to the left was a nice view of Saturn. The moon was dark for almost an hour until the Earth's shadow moved over and let the sunlight pass again to the moon and it started to brighten just before 8pm.
Despite the questionable weather early on, we had a total of 18 people show up. We didn't count the group in a car that arrived, circled the parking lot without lights for a few turns, and set up shop appearing to be "vendors" of some type of goods. They weren't selling ice cream to kids, so they were chased away leaving a trail of obscenities in their wake. They must not have been astronomers since they didn't return for a look through the scopes.
There was a total of about 4 or 5 scopes, anything from a wobbly t

oy scope, to a 10 inch Meade GPS scope, numerous binoculars, and many pairs of eyes directed eastward. Tom even tried an experiment seeing if he could control the observatory scope in his backyard remotely with a laptop using Renton's city broadband wireless connection. He got the connection working after a little fiddling around, and was just about to slew the telescope off Betelgeuse and star hop the scope over to the moon. Even though the battery showed a couple hours left, it suddenly died in the cold. It was considered a successful experiment since it would have worked fine in warmer temperatures or better power.
After about 9:00pm the show was pretty much over and we were all pleased that we had good luck finally and were able to sneak in a sky viewing event. So we all headed home in the familiar brightness of the full moon again.