by Marek Cichanski
Although I had my 18" in the Jeep, I decided to unload it and swap it out for my ED80. Turned out to be a decision that I was quite happy with - I hadn't used the little refractor in forever, and it worked out great. Easy set-up, easy tear-down, nice views.
In fact, it was quite a small-refractor fest at the 'ol MB lot. I think that just about everyone had brought their grab-and-go scopes. I had my ED80, Lance had his William Optics 80mm, Slava had his ED80, Greg had his Sky 90 on a very cool alt-az mount with slow-mo controls, and Carl had a Meade (102?) ED APO refractor, which I'm sorry I didn't mooch a view through. I think that Matt Marcus and Dennis Steele were the aperture kings with a C8 and (I think) a C9.5. Stacy kept the faith with her dob. A nice set of folks and scopes.
I arrived after sunset, during twilight. After the earlier interchange about MB conditions, the weather was hilariously "Montebello". I mean, if you looked up "Montebello OSP" in the dictionary, there would be a picture of the lot at 8pm on 9/10/2005: Cold north wind blowing, with a fogbank just a few hundred meters away to the west, sending shreds of cloud over us periodically. Dew on everybody's charts, bright moonlight, and underwater-bad seeing. Classic!
However, we didn't give up. People just got about the business of observing. Many a low-magnification target was scoped. The cloud actually helped block out the moon a fair amount of the time, which was surprisingly nice. I bopped around from one eye candy target to another. Probably the most memorable thing that any of us did was to look at the full Veil complex. I used a 31 Nagler and an OIII filter to encompass the whole thing. I can't say that it was especially bright, but it was doable. I think Greg did the same in his Sky 90, which of course looked a bit brighter.
After about 10:30, the wind died down quite nicely, and the fog mostly retreated. Remarkable. Moon set around 10:30 or 11:00. We started to remark on how nice the night was turning out.
We started to get some dew on our optics around 11 or 11:30, and those of us with dew heaters saddled up and plugged in. Lance kindly strolled about and cleared people off with his heavy-duty 12v hair dryer from Camping World.
Shortly before midnight, it seemed like we were about to get overrun by a big fogbank, this time from the south. People broke down, and it seemed to be enough of a sacrifice. I stayed set up, and it cleared off. After Lance/Mary and Matthew left, I observed until 2. The previously atrocious seeing had gotten quite good. I saw some detail on Mars with the ED80, and had some great views of open clusters, including M39, the Double Cluster, and the Auriga Messiers. In terms of faint-ish stuff, I looked at the Helix, 253, and 288. Had the latter two in the same field. I even decided to go after NGC 891, and I'm about 75% sure that I saw it. It was really marginal, but I think I just got it with averted vision. M33 looked surprisingly nice, too, although I couldn't really make out any spiral structure.
Other eye candy looked as you'd expect - M15, M2, M31, the Sagittarius area stuff, etc... I meant to go after Uranus but forgot to.
Towards the end of the night, the seeing made it very nice for a small refractor. Working around 30-50x, the stars were wonderful pinpoints. I mag-ed up on Alrescha (120x, IIRC), and it 'snowmanned' quite nicely.
All in all, a much better night than anyone would have guessed at sunset. It may have been cold and threatening for much of the night, but in a way I saw it as a very nice 'welcome back' session. MB can be very kind that way, and I'm grateful.
Posted on sf-bay-tac Sep 11, 2005 04:09:57 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Mar 12, 2006 14:47:13 PT