Wow what a afternoon and night.
Roll Call (in order of appearance, I think

)
Astroron
jjjnettie
Nightshift
[1ponders]
drmorbius and mini-morbius (plus 2)
Nordo
Graeme
Xeelee and Mike
adelain
There may have been others but it was dark
I arrived just after 3 to find Dennis and Jeanette already set up and raring to go, and giving the sun the once over and then hunting down Jupiter for daylight viewing. I had my usual setting up ritual, and broad shouldedly wearing the slings and arrows from the visual brigade
There was a fair bit of smoke around, but the afternoon cleared of clouds so we were hopeful of a good evening. First of the mark for the evening was a mag 1 fly over from west to east of the HST. Cool

Then not long after that a -6 iridium flare that drew gasps of appreciation and awe from pretty much everyone. 2Xcool


Some serious astronomy was then gotten down to

I'll let others describe what they got up to.
My night involved showing Graeme early on, how to use K3CCDTools to drift align. This took some time as I'd forgotten to level my tripod first


Not critical but it does take more iterations to get it right.

Oh well. Neptune and Uranus were my main targets for the night, but before I started on them I did a bit of a tour of the dobs to see what everyone else sees in then

Did a bit of a sky tour with the laser helping to point things out and just generally checked things out. Checked out one of Uranus' moons in Ron's 16", which was way cool.
Everyone started to fade away between 21:00 and 01:00, but the diehards stayed on, enduring a final temp of only 3 deg

(thank heavens for the bioheater tucked under my jacket

)
After I finished imaging Neptune and Uranus ( and after a suitable break for tea and chocolate at around 01:00) I rattled off half a dozen images of M31 for processing later. It looked fantasic in the binocs

It was about this time that I heard exclamations of wonder from Ron and Jeanette and I noticed that the side of the house was lite up and everything was casting shadows. I turned around to witness the last 30 degree fall of one of the brightest and intensely arc blue-white meteor I have seen for a long long time. It was stunning! Especially the way it broke up near the end. There had been a lot of meteors through the night but this one seemed to signal the end of the fireworks and viewing as the fog moved in on cue. It was going to be a real pea souper that stayed til well after sun up. Ron and I had a bit of a green laser duel, complete with sound effects, that is always fun in thick fog

and we called it a night.
Thanks for putting on a great night Ron, and thanks everyone for the great company. It was great that Jeanette could make it as well, as it's a fair hike for her.