Carpe Datum

Well, you also had the television news and such also giving you some PR love on the proximity of the planet. So there's that. But, hey, that's pretty neat.

Apparently, there was a similar turn out at our observatory (300 people+, on estimate), FWIW.

I had the same sort of thing happen Longer Ago Than I Care To Think. At UW as an undergrad I eventually (midway through my junior year) got hired as work-study to run nightly public viewing on the old Campus Observatory 6-inch. (Prior to that, it was done by pressganged grad students one night a week.) If the weather was bad, I did a slide show in the lecture room in that building.

In my Very First Week doing this, Seattle had one of those weird spells of weather where it was clear for five consecutive nights in January, right when winter quarter started. And for whatever reason, it seemed like all the radio stations in town picked up the announcement. Visitor count on those nights went 10-25-50-over 100-over 200 in the 2-hours shifts. That's going purely by count of signatures in the visitor book; those last two nights in particular could be even higher than that. (Jupiter and Saturn were visible in the evening sky that winter, so that's pretty much all we looked at.)

Very overwhelming. Fortunately the 6-inch tracks well, so I didn't have to stand at the telescope the full time; I could walk the crowd and talk. There was no press coverage; I have no idea what I would have done if the press had showed up. That was pretty much my first I'm-the-whole-show public display experience, and to get that load in literally my first week of doing it was rather draining.