Coe, Wednesday, 1/1/03

by Matthew Marcus

I was alone under partly cloudy skies until around sundown, at which point Bob Czerwinski and one of the Daves (sorry! I forget which) turned up). While waiting for it to get properly dark, we looked at Saturn and M1 (I could still see the nebula in the Ranger), the Pleiades, and other bright stuff.

It then got dark, and we started doing some real observing, but with an eye out to a threatening mass of clouds in the west. Sure enough, it came over, and I started moving around, trying to evade it. The Water was clear for a while, so I got M77 in Cetus, tried for something else, got clouded, went for Eridanus, got a galaxy, got clouded, then I figured I'd go below the cloud layer by hitting Sculptor, but I didn't go quite low enough. By that time, Taurus was my next hope for a clear patch, so I hit it. I got Do14, a real Navarette of an OC, then got clouded. Onto Orion, where I got 30 seconds of the 1973-1975-1977 complex before... Well, you get the idea. By that time, the wind was kicking up pretty good and the clouds covering most of the sky, so we waited a bit. This just got us a good view of overcast and more wind, so we packed up. I was outta there by 9:30. Oh, well. Better than no observing!

At least I didn't get dewed.