We had a quite good night at Fremont Peak (near San Juan Bautista, California) September 14-15, 1996. There was a lot of fog and wet air near sea level, and the brisk sea breeze of early evening threatened to bring it all up slope and shut us down, but instead, the wind died down, the fog stayed on top of the city lights where it belongs, and we had a quite pleasant dark night.

The evening's sights started early. As the sun sank through clear, post-frontal air toward the far western horizon, I noted how golden and little obscured its colors were. As the last rim of the solar disc was about to disappear, I saw its color tending toward yellow. "Look, look!" I cried, "I think we're going to get a green flash!" And we did, all the way past green into the blue, in fact. I called the color "indigo", though someone else claimed it was only "teal".

I went chasing obscure double stars with my Intes 6-inch f/10 Maksutov, and got dewed out an hour before I was ready to leave. I dug out my 10x70 Orion binocular and started looking casually at things. The North American and Pelican nebulae were easy, as were the eastern and western arcs of the Veil, and the long central triangular patch. Hmn. Sculptor was pretty well risen, so I took a look at NGC 253 and 288, then dropped the field to the general location of the Sculptor Dwarf Galaxy, which I had previously seen with this instrument. I was able to log it only as "suspected", though.

I poured some coffee in anticipation of the long drive home, and while sipping it wandered over behind the ranger's house, where all the folks with big iron had set up. Someone had a nice 20x100 binocular with modern optics, and let me play with it. I looked at Sculptor once again, and found the view of the Sculptor Dwarf more convincing. I showed the area to several other people, and we all agreed that we saw a brightening of the field at the right place.

By now there was a good deal of interest -- very few people have seen this galaxy -- so of course everybody wanted to try other telescopes. I was skeptical about the larger telescopes, the great size and lack of edges of the dwarf galaxy often makes it just about undetectable with a field of view much smaller than a couple of degrees, but it couldn't hurt to try. In a 14-inch Newtonian at 58x, with just about a degree of field of view, the Sculptor Dwarf was much more obvious than I had feared. One of us remarked that it looked like a bad case of vignetting, except when you moved the telescope, it stayed put on the sky. The bright patch was obvious on moving the telescope around. We also tried a Meade 12-inch SCT on an LX-200 mount, with a 35 mm Panoptic eyepiece. At the resulting magnification of 87x, the Scuptor Dwarf was again visible. All of these observations were made with no light-pollution filters -- they don't help much with galaxies. I was very pleased to be able to show this elusive object to other folks. "It's amazing how gullible people are," I remarked, "here we all agree we have something that isn't there at all."

Someone suggested chasing after the California Nebula. Once we had remembered where it was, it was easy in both the 20x100 and the 14-inch, both unfiltered and with an Orion UltraBlock, I think it was. The nebula spanned some three 58x fields in the 14-inch.

In the big binocular, the Pleiades were filled with rich nebulosity. The Merope nebula was easy with direct vision, and all the other bright stars in the cluster seemed wreathed with nebulosity. Except for the Merope nebula, all the glow we saw was symmetrical about one or another of the stars, so difficult to distinguish from radiation due to dew. Cynical fellow that I am, I thought to turn on a red light and look hard at the objectives, but no, they were dew-free.

The owner of the Meade 12-inch SCT wanted to look for detail in M31. At 87x, we saw two dust lanes on the side of the nucleus toward M110, and one on the side toward M32. We traced the galaxy out all the way to the bright star cloud -- is it NGC 206 (my atlases are at home)? -- part way out one spiral arm, then beyond for another field or more.

Both with and without filters, we saw a lot of nebulosity associated with zeta Orionis and several neighboring stars, but by the time I finally left, the constellation was still too low to find the Horsehead. I expect somone got it later.