by Peter Natscher
Bob Czerwinski and I set up our two large Starmaster Dobs at the SW parking lot up at Fremont Peak last night in what turned out to be an exceptional night of steady seeing. From sunset on, I was getting excited. My first object of inspection was the nearly first quarter moon hanging due south over the Peak's summit in Scorpius. My 20" Starmaster and 22mm Panoptic gave a very crisp lunar view showing a lot of very subtle mare shading and crater detail. The lunar limb was as still as a photograph. I then pointed the scope to Antares (alpha Scorpius) to chance a double star sighting. WoW! the tiny green secondary was very there and showing as an easily spilt double star. The air around us was truly laminar. I hadn't see the Antares double this well since my view of it from Lassen. Bob's 18" also split Antares easily. The moon was only a few degrees to the north, but that didn't affect me ensuing globular cluster observations in the immediate area. I finished logging and sketching the 12 globulars I needed to see in the Scorpius and Ophiuchus constellations, plus a few planetaries. Some of them are faint and unresolvable, but the great seeing at -27 degrees produced pinpoint stars on these globulars even as they passed right over the Peak. My only disappointment was not being able to spot NGC6144, a mag. 11 Globular right next to Antaries and M4. The bright moon was only a few degrees away from it washing out that part of the sky. It's a H400 object I will have to log and sketch soon before it sets into the twilight.
After the moon set at 11:50pm, the sky really got dark due to the good fog covering below us. I was able to spot a few mag. 15 stars which are very close too M57. Its central star was visible with direct vision in my 20" using over 400x. As another seeing test, I located 72 Pegasi which is catalogued to be a 5.2/5.8 double with 0.5 arc-sec separation. I cranked up the horsepower to over 800x (5mm Tak LE and 2x Celestron Barlow) and Bam! There it was, completely split along with fairly good diffraction encircling the pair of tiny star points. I haven't done a 0.5 clean split for some time around here.
The temp. never went below 74 degrees--a really nice late summer night at the Peak.