The forecast for days before, was for rain and clouds, and it proved to be true, unfortunately. It was actually a re-run of the original walk that had to be postponed because of snow!
This time there would have been plenty to see, if it had been less cloudy, but on the night there proved to be gaps in the cloud to let the hoards of visitors, walkers, see the Moon, Jupiter and several stars, and even a little look at M42. However, it was held on Red Nose Day, and that coupled with the bad weather, reduced the numbers from the planned maximum of 100, to 4, or can we count one of the Mosaic Trust's trustees and his grandson as another 2, raising the total to 6 visitors.
The council and NHS sent, I think, 8 between them and we fielded the following. Phil, Mark, Vic, Rhys, Elaine and Paul, Lesley and Dave, Peter, Sandra and Dennis. We also had Michelle and Christine, who run the Study Centre, they went out on the walk too.
We had both domes open, two classrooms ready to accommodate the 100 expected visitors, both with food and hot drinks and a slide show. Two of us were dressed in high visibility vests, to handle all the car parking, two cars, and three of us were seconded to take laser pointers out on the walk to point out interesting things in the sky to the walkers. These actually were needed and did a good job during the planned short rests on the walk.
The sponsor, the NHS's Vanessa, must have thought it worthwhile as she asked us to host another Walk in November. The potential is good indeed, if the weather is kind.
Hopefully we have converts in some of the council and NHS people. We seem to have a couple in the two Study Centre girls, neither of whom had looked through the telescopes before, but were impressed with the experience that night.