Lake Sonoma Sat 5 March - WTF?

by Matthew Marcus

I got to Lake Sonoma and found new, locked gates at Lone Rock and Gray Pine! What's going on here?? Is this just for the off-season, however that's defined? Does anyone have contact info for whoever would know? Fortunately, this isn't a !OR because Little Flat was open. This is the first area you get to after the bridge when coming in, and it's on the right. It's a bit lower than our usual sites, and brighter because of all-night lights at the boat dock (all thieves are photophobes, right??), and it doesn't have as good a S horizon. However, it is better protected from car headlights.

There was one other person there (sorry, can't remember your name!), who had a homebuilt 13" ball-mount scope. It was his first scope. We had a good time trading views. I got to use my new Persistent Thread Generator for its intended purpose for the first time. If you don't know what that is, a hint: it creates green light in the hand and heat on TAC :-)

The CSC's predicted little cloud cover and moderate seeing. What we got was considerable clouds and crappy seeing. When I looked at Jupiter at 10:30PM, I could barely see belts. Cassini's division was barely visible on Saturn, even when it transited.

All that aside, I had fun doing Messiers in preparation for the Marathon, adding some notes to Machholtz's guide with better ways to find stuff than "13deg E and 5deg N of the previous object" as he likes to do. I hadn't observed in so long I'd forgotten how good it feels! All the stress of a hard work-week went away. It's better than yoga.

See you at Coe for the Marathon - I hope!

Posted on sf-bay-tac Mar 06, 2005 11:23:50 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Mar 12, 2005 09:09:22 PT