Saturday, October 27, 2012 - Move to Belmead, Spaghetti Dinner and Astronomy Night

In keeping with our constantly changing schedule, we packed up and headed out to Belmead, to a large area known as the loading zone, but which was the area the club members used to camp. There was one water spigot, so we filled up our tanks, and quickly settled in. The club was having a spaghetti dinner and invited us to join them, so we did. Afterward we learned about a local astronomy club meeting at the mansion, though it was a cloudy night so we wouldn’t be doing any stargazing. Two lectures were presented, one by a local amateur astronomer, whose favorite thing is to find anomalies on the surface of the moon, which we pretty interesting, and the second by a professor from Howard University who normally would talk about the stars the group would be seeing, but since that wasn’t going to happen, he spent a great deal of time discussing and Powerpointing all the various phases of the moon, for us a very basic lesson reminiscent of elementary school, middle school at best. I found myself reverting to just the kind of student I was when I was in school, always with the answer, until the teacher had to start to ignore me just to include other students in the conversation, while the other students kept looking to me for the answers... :-). Old habits die hard. Anyway, as a finish to the evening, I offered for Hubby to do a little scene from his one man show, a particularly apt scene when Galileo first discovers that the moon is not "a perfect sphere as Aristotle had said she was, but an orb of irregular terrain, just like our Earth." It was well received by the other attendees, who seemed to enjoy it. Afterward, we made our way back to the campground, where the wind was just starting the pick up a bit in front of the hurricane. We tucked in for the night, waiting for Sandy to arrive.