Several of us went to Fremont Peak Saturday (June 14th) but fog and high clouds chased us away. Rod Norden and I gave it another try Sunday. We go to the Peak about 6:30pm Sunday. The sky was clear and the seeing very good. The seeing was even better between 10pm and 11pm.

We had our AP 180mm EDT f/9s. Most of the time was spent looking at the Moon. I had fun looking at the domes a little east of Copernicus. Most have little pits. I guess the pits are/were vents? The Sun was just light the west wall of Gassendi. It was fun watching more and more little bright points show in Gassendi as it got closer to midnight. Too bad we had to leave before the light flooded the floor of Gassendi. It is also too bad we couldn't wait for Jupiter to rise, it was a beautiful night.

Most of the time I was using my Zeiss bino viewer with 7mm Naglers. Near 11pm the seeing was so good I thought I'd try Epsilon Lyra. The Double Double showed 4 nice little airy discs. I moved the scope to look at Nu Scorpio and again 4 very nice airy discs with nice dark gap between close pair.

Rod asked about the bino viewer barlow so I thought I give it a try with the 7mm Naglers. It is a 3x barlow made for the bino viewer. I believe the bino view adds about 25% to the magnification of the eyepieces without the barlow. So the 7mm Naglers in the bino viewer with the barlow are running about 868x or 694x if there is no increase caused by the bino viewer. The lunar features still looked very good. Rod said "Lets try Mars". I was surprised it looked very good. Syrtis Major was easy to see, so was Hellas, the polar cap and the darker area around the polar cap. Not bad at 100 or 120 x per inch of aperture with Mars less than 9 arc seconds in diameter.

Rod's scope was doing an equally beautiful job, I can't see a difference bewtween the two scopes.

We left the peak just before midnight. It was really an enjoyable night.