by Peter Natscher
Fremont Peak last night offered Jamie Dillon, Bob Czerwinski, and I and excellent 3-4 hours of week night observing. No wild pigs were to be seen this time out. The SW parking lot was very quite for a summer night. The fog came in on time darkening the already calm and steady sky above. The sky had very good transparency with the Milky Way showing a lot of its dark matter sillouetted against its galactic glow through Cygnus and all the way down to Scutum and Sagittarius. Checking out the seeing, the 10" Mak was slewed straight up to the double-double, epsilon Lyra, affording me a clean split that would allow a big rig through at 550x. The diffration rings around these two pairs of doubles was textbook. Next at 375x, the premium A-P 10" Mak picked out all of the closely surrounding mag. 14 stars (5 of them) of this bright planetary along with my first view of its central star through this scope. It's the first time I've been able to pick out M57's central star with only 10 inches of aperature. All stars through the Mak looked pin-point at 550x attesting to the very good seeing. With Lyra at the zenith, I could easily spot one of three mag. 6.7 stars between Vega and epsilon Lyrae naked eye. There are three of them there.
I brought my 10" Mak-Cass scope to the Peak to continue logging and sketching my Herschel 400 Project object. I'm up to 280 objects out of the 400. But, the sky is moving westward each time I get out and I'm falling behind schedule getting stuck in Virgo's large list of H400 galaxies. Last night's objects all lay in Virgo, Canes V., and Coma B. The W. Virgo area of the sky is disappearing by 11 pm and the scheduled NGC's located there required the Mak's dark field of view to pick out well from their low elevation above the W. horizon.