Charleston Lake Star Gaze 2011
We just returned (early) from Charleston Lake Provincial Park (Ontario), from a
couple of days of camping and from attending Terence Dickinson’s (Skynews Magazone) 26th!
Charleston Lake Provincial Park Star Event.
It was nice to have it on a Saturday this year, as in past years it had
been all over the weekdays and made it that much more difficult to
attend if one had to work the next morning.
The forecast on Saturday morning was for SUN and 29 degrees. Mid
afternoon the lightning, thunder and rains appeared. Good thing we had
already come back off the lake canoeing for several hours.
It stopped long enough for dinner and Terence’s talk from 8:30-9:30 pm but
the clouds did not go away. The star gazing portion after the talk was
a no go and we headed back to camp, and around midnight the skies opened
up again with rain and lightning and thunder. Off and on most of the
night so at daybreak we broke camp and headed home.
Terence gave a good show again, involving the young kids in the almost
capacity crowd in the park amphitheatre. The talk was aimed at nature,
light pollution and some basic questions of scale.
Charleston Lake in general is in a good dark sky area but still there
are more trees than ever for limiting available horizon. The Friends of
Charleston Lake are now involved in funding more interpretive
programming, including Terence’s talk.