After having to postpone our Stargazing Live events from January due to the snow and ice, this weekend saw the rescheduled public sessions in Shurdington on Saturday night, and Nature in Art near Twigworth on Sunday. Our luck was in hugely - Saturday was clear enough (but with some cloudy patches) to be worthwhile, and tonight's session was very clear indeed. Two decent nights on the bounce, coinciding with our public events....what are the odds?!

In the interests of simplicity, I used my 4" refractor both nights to show people the Double Cluster in Perseus. This is a fab object in a widefield scope, and I got a decent number of "oooohs" and "aaahs" over the two evenings! We tried to be a bit more organised this year, and we made sure that all the telescopes were pointing at different objects so people got to see a range of things. This seemed to work really well, and got people to stay outside for a decent amount of time too to chat with us all. The ISS passed over on both evenings and was really prominent, so that was another very happy coincidence.

We had an excellent turnout on both evenings, which was especially gratifying given how long past the actual BBC shows we ended up doing these events. With any luck, we'll have attracted a few more people to the idea of joining their local astronomical society - and a few of us got to help people get their own telescopes set up and working, which I guess is a real help if you're new to this stuff, got a scope for Christmas, and can't make head or tail of the instruction booklet.

Overall, really successful and enjoyable couple of nights.