Our Fall 2000 trip had a cloudy beginning with Friday night unyielding to a slow moving front.  Saturday would eventually give way to clearing skies, however, allowing for late autumn pictures of the surrounding bogs and woods - pretty!  Three rockets left "the pad" up on the hill that afternoon - a small sample rocket and two larger G-class flights.  Mr. Vance finally had parachute success with his G 35-5 Tomahawk, a rocket that has flown several times at Fish Lake.  It will fly again having been recovered 1/4 mile west of the hill.  Mr. Eric Kennedy's 3-engine G-80 cluster flew off the pad, quite unexpectedly like a bullet, especially since it was rather heavy initially.  It took a "core sample" in the woods to the north of ground zero where it was later recovered.  T'was a crowd pleaser for sure in spite of the aggressive landing!

A wonderfully delicious turkey dinner with all the fixin's gave way to darkening clear skies and a view of the International Space Station fly-over directly overhead.  Before long,  folks were looking at autumn splendors such as M31 and the Double Cluster, as well as Venus, Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, and Jupiter (pretty much in that order!).  Saturn's southern flank was showing well.  Mr. Kevin Dehne gave his popular constellation tour while the telescopes took on a rather heavy frost.  By morning you would have thought it snowed!  One out of two nights in Michigan clear?.... hey, we'll take it.  But the star of the show was the multi-hour aurora display with varying shades of green and red for half the night.  Reds in the early evening changed to green banding, then more reds with green and the characteristic dancing streamers that would occasionally erupt - WOW!

Sunday was just scrumptious, too... fine for a morning walk or jog.  Hard to believe it was late October.