Go West old man!: Ft. Davis and McDonald Observatory

What a day of ups and downs. Overall a fine day but with moments.

OK, so we go into Ft. Davis to play tourist and see the sights. We are at the nuthouse, no no, the one where you buy nuts... Anyway, the credit card doesn't work, neither of our cards work; and we just used it the night before. Called Cabela's and sure enough they had put a hold on the card due to suspicious activity. Seems someone has made a few purchases in the last few days, in Virginia!
used a physical card too. So someone made a card using our account number. Probably from one of those big hacks they made at major sales places in the last year. We arranged for new cards to be sent to a campground we'll be at in a few days. Using our back up cards in the meantime. But that all took a while, especially because we had to arrange the campground while the Cabela's Card agent waited on the other phone! But that is really close monitoring and service on their part to spot that fraudulent activity in the midst of all our traveling purchases.

We did buy some pecans despite the card hassle. Toured downtown Ft. Davis and then went out to Ft. Davis Historic Site. This was a fort built to protect the settlers and gold rush guys, then saw a little action during the Civil War. After that it was a Buffalo Soldiers post in the later 1800s.

When we got back to camp we had a visit from a couple of park deer. I got a photo of one buck.

This evening we went up to the McDonald Observatory for a Star Party. After a short presentation we all got to look through 4 different telescopes at different objects. It was not a perfectly clear night but much better than I expected for what had been an overcast day. We saw Uranus, the Andromeda Galaxy, a star cluster and the Orion Nebula. All pretty cool things to look at. That was topped off by an unplanned and so far still unexplained sight. A point of bright light in the western sky grew brighter and then sent out a huge cloud as it went off to the south, leaving a growing cloud behind. The best guess is that SpaceX launched Falcon Heavy just four hours earlier from Kennedy Space Ctr. Possibly a second stage burn as part of the test flight?

I'm not sure what I'll get out tomorrow night. We are going to City of Rocks State Park in NM. We were there last year and I'm pretty sure there is no cell and no WiFi. If I get anything out it will have to be before we get to camp!