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Dodge Center outreach event of 9-5-2024 was sparsely attended (mainly by club members and Ingvild Herfindahl the library director). Ingvild did her best to get the North Park lighting turned off but Excel Energy did not respond to her request. We had a good discussion during the presentation portion (about Orion-Meade departure from commercial Astronomy, light pollution maps and dark sky locations in MN, initial planning for future presentations and discussion of tech advances in telescopes/mounts).
The sky was clear and Josef was able to view many unique stars, star clusters, nebulae and Saturn.
I recorded the sky darkness at our observing site and the data appears in the plot below. The Mag./arc-sec2 was 19.79 corresponding to a Naked eye limiting magnitude of 5.35. Of interest is a reading taken in Dodge Center in 2015 of 20.34 mag./arc-sec2). While worsening of light pollution is possible, results cannot be definitively compared as the location in Dodge Center and the meter used in 2015 is unknown.