We had a large number of telescopes along with a number visitors last night at Fremont Peak. In our little area of the Peak there were several large Dobs (14.5 to 20"), several medium sized Dobs and SCTs, and several refractors. There was a Takahashi FS-128, a Traveler and an AP 180mm EDT. There were a number of other interesting scopes there too. At least two other parts of the park had a number of telescopes. One person had a new Orion ShortTube 80mm refractor. With a 35mm Ultrascopic eyepiece the view of the comet was one of the best.

We had very good seeing and just a few thin clouds low in the west. Comet Hale-Bopp showed very interesting detail in the head. There was an "S" shaped structure between the false nucleus and the arcs of light infront of the "nucleus".

A friend took some photos of the comet with his camera attached to my 180 EDT. He didn't have his off axis guider and I didn't bring a guide scope so we just shot and hoped I wasn't too far off in polar alignment. We used an AP 0.74x flat field focal reducer. The camera was a 35mm Nikon F.

Mars was outstanding. I've never seen so much detail. With the 180mm EDT and the Zeiss binoviewer you could see the rough edges in the outline of Syrtis Major. Rather than a soft edged feature the seeing frequently showed it with hard, irregular edges. The polar cap was very distinct with dark features around it. There were a number of small markings between the cap and Syrtis Major. Hellas looked very white. If there hadn't been so many people I would have tried sketching the detail.

With the bino viewer I was using 7.5mm Takahashi LE eyepieces and 7mm Naglers. Without the bino viewer I was using a 5mm Takahashi LE and sometimes the 7.5mm LE with a 2x barlow. The bino viewer increas the power of an eyepiece by about 25%. With the bino viewer I was using about 270x and 290x and without the bino viewer 324x and 432x.

At one point using 432x the seeing poped very clear and the view of Syrtis Major almost unnerving, like I almost got a little too close. ;-)

I looked at M42, the Eskimo nebula, M51, M101, M104, M13, NGC4565, and a number of galaxies in the Coma/Virgo area. I stayed long enough to get a nice look at the Moon but I was really getting tired by about 1:30am and some of the Lunar features I wanted weren't as close to the Terminator as I thought so I didn't stay all night. I hope we get lucky and have as good seeing next week Saturday.