In an attempt to garner a larger audience and draw a few "converts" from the general public, the Astrolabe Astronomy Club moved its National Astronomy Day festivities to the Ohio Valley Mall in St Clairsville, Ohio.

Our showpiece was the StarLab portable planetarium, with over 60 people of all ages attending the shows put on by Robert Strong. Total attendance for the 4 hours was well in excess of 100! We found the central location and novelty of a "giant gray igloo" to be prime attractors, especially to kids. Additionally, we offered a variety of literature (thanks to the NASA Educators Center on the campus of Wheeling Jesuit University), lots of telescopes to "check out", lots of GREAT advice, solar viewing, and an in-mall telescope vendor, in addition to the StarLab. The telescopes included every popular type: Maksutov-Cassegrain, Schmidt-Cassegrain, refractor, equatorial reflector, and Dobsonian reflector, each of which was "the best" according to their owners! Hopefully, the ever-popular debate didn't confuse our visitors TOO much!

That evening, we put on a star watch at Site #1, Grand Vue Park, Moundsville, WV, with many of the people we met at the mall coming out to get a look at the real thing. This was the first Astronomy Day star watch in 3 years to actually have clear skies, so all were quite pleased, both visitors and club members. Appropriate "Ooohs" and "Ahhs" were heard when looking at such popular objects as the Moon, Saturn,  Jupiter, and a variety of Messier objects including the Sombrero Galaxy, some of the Virgo cluster galaxies, the Great Hercules Globular, the Whirlpool Galaxy, and more.

All in all, we were quite pleased with the results from this year's festivities and look forward to a repeat performance next year. The experiment with the mall seems to have worked out well, but we will keep our options open for next year.Membership in Astrolabe is open to anyone interested in Astronomy and the space sciences. Dues are a low $3 per year, which enrolls the member in the Astronomical League.