I went to Fremont Peak on Saturday evening, 13 July, with my Intes 6-inch f/10 Maksutov. It being dark of the Moon in summer, things were very crowded. Coulter Camp, the usual setup area, looked zooish, so I decided to put my telescope behind the ranger's house, in the area where the rule is not to come unless you plan on staying the night, so as not to disrupt photographs and images with your lights. I didn't plan to stay that long, so I parked my car elsewhere and carried equipment in and out.

The ranger's back lot was aperture city, with more than half a dozen Dobsons of sixteen inches and up, the usual host of SCT clones, and punier scopes by Astrophysics (six-inch), Takahashi (a four, I think), Televue (four and 70 mm), and Questar (a seven). All the good spots were taken, so I set up part way up the road to the 30-inch, with an excellent south horizon.

My view included some ranch land below the hill line, several miles away. I entertained passers-by with a medium-magnification view and erudite intellectual discussion of the orbital dynamics of a rare astronomical object, a double cow. I don't remember the constellation (though it was in the Milky Way), but I am pretty sure the greek letter for this celestial sight was moo (mu).

Jupiter was an interesting target; there was a transit of Io that evening, and several times I looked at the tiny round black dot of the moon's shadow crossing the Jovian disc. It showed clearly at 167x, as did a lot of belt detail.

Comet Hale-Bopp is beginning to put on quite a show. The coma seems more centrally concentrated than when I last looked, which may mean that more material is evaporating from the nucleus. I viewed it in the Intes at 38x, 121x, and 167x, and the general appearance at all three magnifications was a broad fan-shaped coma with asymmetrically placed condensation toward the apex of the fan. It was an easy object in the 7x35 finder as well, and detectable naked-eye once I knew exactly where to look amid the star-rich field.

Set up next to me was a person using a SBIG CCD camera on a Televue Genesis. He had with him a sheaf of printed images taken with that instrument and with his C-11. Some showed Hale-Bopp, and he pointed out that whereas the bright fan shape we have all been talking about points one direction, if you expose deeply enough to get the faintest portions of the comet, the long axis goes quite another way. He attributed this phenomenon to our looking almost end-on at a curved tail. I wonder if perhaps we weren't seeing an asymmetric coma bulging sunward with the tail behind.

I spent most of the night looking at double stars. The Intes performed very well, even in less than perfect seeing -- I was splitting garden-variety Struve doubles down to a bit over an arc-second separation at 167x (9mm Vixen Lanthanum), and some of these had considerable differences in magnitudes between primary and secondary. Occasionally I had to put in more magnification to get a good view; I used 375x (Meade 4 mm Research-Grade Orthoscopic). At this latter power, I again split zeta Bootis (0.9 arc second), though it was more than half way down the sky and I had to wait quite a while for the seeing to settle sufficiently to do so.

I had occasion to show epsilon Bootis to a newcomer, a woman who had been doing binocular astronomy with 20 or 25 mm aperture. I set it up at 167x, and obtained what was to me a clear separation, but she couldn't see it. At 375x, the separation and color were much more obvious to her. I suspect she simply was having the experience we all have had, that it is difficult to see certain things until you have learned how to use vision. Nevertheless, it is interesting actually to have use for as much magnification as that -- I don't use an 0.4 mm exit pupil often. (Though strictly, I shouldn't imply that 375x was necessary for any of the observations for which I used it; I just happened to grab the 4 mm eyepiece -- an interim magnification, between 167 and 375, might have done as well.)

I did some galaxy-viewing. At 47x, M51 showed a hint of spiral detail, rather like the "section" symbol in some fonts, and its companion, NGC 5195, was easy to see. At 47x, Barnard's Galaxy, NGC 6822, was easy with averted vision. At 47x, NGC 7331 was easy, and at 75x I could see Stefan's Quintet as an area of blobby darkness with averted vision; the detail was hard to see. Not bad for a six-inch, though I have identified part of the Quintet in my 90 mm Vixen refractor.