MB 9/11/07 Old Friends

by George Feliz

I rolled into the lot a bit after 7:30 and there were already three setups - Merak with his 6" Mak-Cas, James with his venerable XT10 on a 1stBase collapsible rocker box, and Christopher with an 100ED refractor on an alt-az mount. I had my home built 10", f/5 Albertscope. Joining us later were Sara and Brandon who came to share views and conversations, and Shane who had a digital camera on a tripod.

I'd not met Christopher and Shane before. Both these friendly Canadians were a nice addition to our little party. Christopher has only been observing about a month, but was picking off Messiers and star hopping like a pro. Shane humored me and shared views even though I think I called him Sean most of the night - sorry.

The weather was mild (maybe high 40's at the coldest) and stayed clear until I left around 11:45 with fingers of fog Carl Sandburging over the hills. The slight breeze at sunset pretty much expired by the time it was dark. There was some dew on my eyepiece case at the end of the night, but nothing to fret about. Seeing was soft early with a less than pristine split of the double-double at 141x and I used this magnification as my early high power limit. Later in the night I used 181x on globs and NGC 7009 (Saturn nebula) as the seeing firmed a bit.

The Milky Way was easily seen, disappointing to recent GSSP attendees, but gratifying to victims of light pollution. It wasn't a particularly dark night, but better than average for MB (I'd guess low mag 5's). Transparency was decent, and we were not bothered by second-hand smoke.

Before it got dark I gave views of bright old friends to the scopeless, new friends, and my old friends. They humored me and feigned interest. :-)

From 9-11pm I roamed around with my preliminary list for Calstar. My targets were mag 11-12 galaxies and I picked up a handful, and missed a handful, primarily due to lower surface brightness and positioning in the sky (at MB, south and west are our friends, north and east...not so much).

Around 11pm I returned to eye candy mode and shared more views, this time with a little more mag than earlier in the evening, and choosing some different targets.

I left Marek as the last man standing around 11:45 and had an uneventful ride home with memories of Old Friends.

George