Thanks to a January 11 Page 1 story in the local daily newspaper about Mars with references to our January 12 Open Night, more than 184 visitors looked through the old scope at the observatory!!! We had lines out to the street! Of course the disappointing reality of Mars observation presented most folk with a pale featureless disk in the eyepiece –the night's sky was clear, but seeing was mostly not so good– still, there was a lot of excitement and interest. If you were good and lucky you could see a hint of shadow within the disk representing surface markings. If you were unlucky high cirrus clouds smeared even the disk. So many beautiful celestial objects to look at but the big draw is the Red Planet. That's the mystique of Mars for ya! I'd wanted to show off other objects but had to stay fixed on Mars until just before 10 PM (we were supposed to have closed at 9:00). Before the clouds began to close in I was able to give the last group a nice look at the Orion Nebula which was spectacular! I'm very sorry the majority of folks missed it. What a night!
Addendum: A friend, director of our club observatory located about 45 miles west of us, reported excellent seeing of Martian detail at about the same time we had only fair seeing. {Sigh!} That's the way it goes: different location and different instrument (he was using a 16-inch reflector — a fair bit larger than the old 9-inch refractor). Could've been the other way around.
PhotonStopper 
What an exciting night for everyone. Sorry the "seeing" was not great.
Yeah. I took many peeks through the eyepiece over the evening and watched viewing vary between fair and poor. People get so excited over the prospect of seeing Mars. Several asked me if we should be able to see craters! I said no, but to let me know if they saw somebody waving. I wished they could have seen the Orion Nebula because it was so beautiful and I'm sure it would have been more impressive than Mars. Then again I'd never had gotten the press coverage or the turnout if that cloud of gas was the only item on the menu! I just hope those many folks weren't so disappointed they won't come back in future to see nebulae and planets we can show well!
Fantastic turnout! Wow! That was indeed quite a night. Congrats! ~S
Yeah, everyone from the Physics Chair to the newspaper reporter who wrote the story was saying "wow!" I still find it hard to believe and I was there doing my best to keep everything running smoothly and keeping a count. The actual attendance was likely closer to 200 but I can vouch for 184+. It was certainly an unexpected and exciting evening and most people seemed to enjoy it, even though the view may have been disappointing. — J.