Last night we took the cub scout pack #774 to the Pima Community College Observatory on the East Campus in Tucson. My son Jason is a Tiger Cub in this pack. The cubs are working on earning their Astronomy Belt Loop.
Since this campus is on the outskirts of town, the skies are reasonably dark (unless the adjacent football field has its lights on). Unfortunately the weather was not cooperative, but we still had a good time. I brought along the Celestron C5+ and they had a C8 set up as well, but the only object we could pull through the clouds was Saturn. I'm glad we at least got that, and in reality that would have been the showpiece object anyway, the kids always are thrilled when they see the rings.
We didn't get to use the main observatory scopes which are a Meade 14" LX200GPS in the main dome, and a Celestron 14" in one of the smaller clamshell domes. The second clamshell dome houses a solar scope setup which produces some really cool images in H-alpha. They have quite a nice setup there but it sounds like there is not a whole lot of demand for using the scopes.
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