I'll keep this relatively short for now. This weekend we are hosting a loooong planned event at our house: the full moon will be rising over the trees across the street, and I'll have all three of my telescopes set up for anyone to look through. We did this once in 1997 or so, with my first telescope, and it was a total riot watching the kids freak out. This time, I've got three telescopes (including a really nice new one) and will have them all set up. We'll be doing this all three nights, Fri-Sat-Sun, so come on down if you're in Atlanta and at all interested. The moon rises over the trees at around 6pm each night, and probably will be visible for an hour or two before we lose it in the leaves of the big oak over our own house.
We invited a gazillion people, and if you're reading this chances are you got the invite, but if not then just come on down. If you don't know where we live, or don't know how to contact me, or don't even know me, well, sorry!
By now I had intended to have written separate posts for telescope #2 and #3, but that'll have to wait.
Come on out, even if the forecast looks like clouds or rain, as we'll just be hanging out crying into our beers.
UPDATE 1: Mother Nature didn't cooperate on Friday or Saturday (Halloween
proper) but Sunday was beautiful and lots of people came over. I was
so busy I forgot to take pictures. Other people took pics though, so I asked around and got a few that I've posted here. The moon pic above is from David Brodeur and shows the view of the moon that I had projected on a screen on the front porch; it's something I've done before and literally stops traffic! 
The other picture is from neighbor Tim Ganey and shows of some of us standing around my old homebrew telescope out in the street, after I moved it out there later in the evening to look at Jupiter. Sadly there are no pictures of the "real" telescopes set up on the front porch. Who knows, maybe we'll do this again someday soon!
UPDATE 2: the monthly newsletter for our neighborhood, the Lake Claire Clarion, did a full page spread about this event in their December issue (PDF, 2.1 MB, see page 3), with a fairly extensive Q&A with me about what we did and the few photos that we did happen to get.
We planning on doing this again in Spring, so watch for the invite!
So glad I came, really beautiful setup! Porch looks great also!
Posted by: Scott Burland | November 03, 2009 at 02:49 PM