More sidewalk astronomy at the park

Everything finally converged and we had a great night for star gazing in the park. Roy R. led the night walk tonight and I set up the Orion and Celestron scopes up in the courtyard. It was crystal clear tonight so I was able to give both scopes a pretty good workout. I'm not yet familiar with the Celestron's hc so I was limited in what we could look at with it but found the moon, venus, and jupiter just fine with it. Alignment is a breeze and seems to be pretty accurate. I used the 'skyalign' mode that requires one to center three bright objects in the ep. The hc then figures out what they are and that's it. I used the moon, venus, and sirius which was visible about dusk. The hc did not list jupiter at first since it was near the zenith and out of reach by the scope. It moved enough by 7:45 that we were able to see it and three moons just fine. Europa and Io were actually aligned so all four were visible, it just looked like three. Calisto was particularly bright. Mare Crisium was an obvious feature on the moon. Wrinkle ridges in the mare were very apparent. I tightened up the 3" mount and it behaved much better. I was able to slew it around to both the Orion nebula and andromeda galaxy fairly quickly. I wasn't familiar enough with the Celestron hc to find anything except planets with it. I need to get out early saturday and play with it some more.
I had both scopes set up low in case young children showed up but everyone was older tonight. Older and better informed! We had some nice discussions on how far it was to venus etc, why the moon was in a different orientation here than in Minnesota, whether we were going to crash into the Andromeda galaxy, and how far were Jupiters moons from Jupiter (I didn't know that one).
Shirtsleeves were fine early but it was cool enough later for a long sleeve shirt. Two chairs worked out fine. Some viewers sat while looking but most just stooped over. Several had binoculars and used them.