Human eyes take roughly thirty minutes to fully dark-adapt, and a single unshielded phone screen or flashlight beam can undo most of that adjustment in seconds — for everyone nearby, not just the person holding the light.
That single fact is the reason every session here is capped well below what the site could technically hold. A crowded session isn’t just a worse experience; past a certain guest density, the light discipline required to keep everyone’s eyes adapted becomes practically impossible to enforce, and the actual astronomy suffers for the whole group at once.
It’s a strange kind of scaling problem — the operational limit here has nothing to do with parking or seating, and everything to do with how human vision recovers from light.