We got up early and got Reese out to his t-ball practice. This is his second year of it and the improvement is amazing. It’s still loosely organized chaos, but not nearly as crazy as last year’s practices were. He’s getting the fundamentals down well. After we got back from the practice it was time for me to head back to MITM, and had to say goodbye again, which really stinks.

Back at MITM I set up the PST and opened it up for viewing. It seemed to be pretty popular.

Later on we headed out for dinner and got a surprise while we were there. It turns out that there’s an Orthodox church out there in the middle of the cornfields of rural southern Illinois. So we went over and met the priest, Fr. Paul, who showed us around the church. It’s about one hundred years old and was undergoing a refurbishment so there was scaffolding in place, but I think everyone enjoyed the visit. For most of them it was the first time in an Orthodox church.

We got back to the farm and I set up the dob to get the glass cooling down. After dark we did a little observing of the moon, Saturn, and Mars. There was too much ambient light to really get any decent views of deep sky objects, but everyone really liked what they could see so it wasn’t a real loss.