When I arrived at Pacheco State Park for a Messier Marathon, I was greeted by a few hardy souls standing around in the drizzle. Of course we were all hoping for the best and were contemplating offering Rashad's new scope as a sacrifice to the rain goods. It was wet and cold. We saw an incredible rainbow with a vibrant violet band. It was almost worth the trip just to see this. This weather was better for a wet t-shirt contest than star gazing. More friends arrived, and a few blue patches appeared as it neared sundown. We decided to set-up the scopes and wait and see what happened. Amazingly the sky cleared and people were getting excited. I wasn't intending to do a Marathon this year, but was poking around anyway at the brighter Messeir objects until it really got dark. Unfortunately, just as it was getting good, the clouds returned. It began to clear again after 15 minutes or so, but this was to be the pattern for the night. Clearing, and then clouds, clearing and then clouds. Oh, did I mention how wet it was? Eyepieces, secondaries, telrads, finder scopes, binoculars. Everything was wet. Luckily I had my little blow dryer and marine battery. It did yeoman's duty clearing lots of scopes and accessories.
I had fun though, and had a few highlights beyond the Messier objects.
I knew there were galaxies very close to M51 and I observed one last night in my 12.5" dob. NGC 5198 is a mag 12.8 galaxy in the same field of view if you put M51 at one edge. It's size is listed as 2.1x1.8 in TheSky. A tiny elongated smudge, it's no wonder I never noticed it before.
Another stunning view was the number of galaxies visible in the eyepiece around M84. I was using a 22 Panoptic eyepiece which gave me a magnification of 69x and a field of view of about 1 degree. In the eyepiece were M's 84 and 88, and NGC's 4387,4388, 4413, 4425, 4438, 4435 and 4402. What a glorious sight!!
The final image I had was of Markarian's chain. Paul Sterngold called me over to his scope to see it and moving the scope around more galaxies kept popping in to view in a row. Singles, doubles, bright, dim, large small. Stunning. He gave me the NGC number of the first one and I went back to my scope to spend more time on the chain. I started at NGC 4474 and followed it down to NGC's 4468, 4459, 4477, 4479, 4473, 4458, 4461 and found myself back in the M84 region. What a wild ride! Check out this SEDS webpage for a nice picture of this area and a detailed galaxy hop.
http://www.seds.org/messier/more/virgo_pix.html
I decided to pack up once a heavy fog fell. Although it was a short observing night, I had a great time.