Star gazing at Lion's Head Marina

While looking at a map of the Bruce Peninsula, the area where we were at the time, I saw a little section detailing astronomy evenings on Fridays and Saturdays at the Lion's Head Marina which is part of where we were camping in the trailer. Being interested in astronomy we all took a walk across once it got dark to see what was going on. I think we should have gone earlier as the event was already under way with telescopes of varying sizes set up and short rows of people lined up eager to look into the Milky Way. At each telescope was a very knowledgable person to explain what was being viewed on his apparatus.

John explaining the wonders of the Universe at his telescope

The first one we looked at was a low power view of the planet Saturn. It was as clearly visible as we had seen it through Phil's telescope in Stratford - a very clear dot with a ring around it and some moons nearby. The owner, John, was also pointing out other stars and constellations with a laser pointer, most of which I as a Southern Hemisphere dweller have never seen, like The Swan, Cassiopeia and the North Star which points to the north celestial pole around which all the stars appear to rotate as the earth spins. John changed the magnification of his telescope to a higher power and we were able to see a somewhat closer view of Saturn and with a bit of intense staring through the viewfinder and possibly imagination, an area of separation between sections of the rings was visible. The bands of rings around Saturn he said was from 1 to 10 meters thick, and there we were looking at all this. Unfortunately I was not able to take any photograph through the viewfinders but was able with the group's permission to take one of the telescope.
We were shown a star cluster called M13 and the Swan nebula through a much bigger and more powerful telescope which was amazing to see.
The International Space Station came hurtling past at about 11:30. The ISS  circles the Earth every 90 minutes at an incredible 7 kilometres a second. That speed is unimaginable.
Something which I noticed, but didn't seem to be interesting enough for the astronomers to focus their telescopes on was a large, very distant glow on the waters of Georgian Bay. Both people I pointed it out to said it looked like the lights of a distant city but there were no cities for many kilometres in that direction or the northern lights but it was the wrong shape and colour. Both then went straight back to explaining some distant star system or galaxy, leaving me even more curious about the lights on the water. It seemed to me that astronomers prefer glows billions of light years away in the sky to odd glows a few hundred kilometres from them in one of the Great Lakes of North America. I may never know what it was... unless I go and search Google for an answer. I'll post any explanation I find here.
(Update: no further explanation found yet)