Placerita Canyon Open House

by: Dave Flynn

It was a nice warm and slightly breezy day at the Placerita Canyon Nature Center on Saturday, May 10th.  Most of us arrived around 9am and set up in our usual place.  The crouds started showing up around 10am.

Glenn Basore, Christine Schmidt, Lavere Schmidt , Dave Flynn, Brian Shurlow, Page  Jennings and  Kathryn Kazmer were all busy handling the many questions at the booth and helping everyone to safely look through the telescopes. 

The Placerita open house event is different from our normal star party events, here we only had solar scopes or telescopes with solar filters and the crowds loved looking at the sun.  The sun was pretty spectacular with a colection of sunspots that initially looked like the big dipper but also changed throughout the day.  Brian found a nice coronal streamer with his H-Alpha scope.

Some of the people stopping at our booth commented about being at Vasquez Rocks or at our Star Party at COC and seeing us there. Even some Cub Scouts recognized us.

It wasn't uncommon to see park staff walking about the park with owls, hawks, snakes and other creatures giving the park patrons quite a treat as they were able to see these creatures up close.

Even Smokey Bear was there posing for pictures and greeting everyone who passed by.

The wind wasn't as big a problem as we had feared although we had a few close calls with the EZ-up.

Things wound down around 3pm so we all packed up and went home.

Dave & Glenn