Actually got out twice in one weekend! The Friday night session was a public star party at a local elementary school with the TAC crowd here in the SF Bay Area. As it was demo night, I revisited all the stuff I had looked at last weekend. Because it was all fresh in my mind from reading Burnham's, I was able to pass myself off as knowing something. If they only knew the truth... Nonetheless, it was fun rolling up the Milky Way from Scorpius through Sagittarius. The late sunsets make for late viewing, so the families with young children didn't last too long until the need for bedtimes intervened. We had a few adults stay later, including one couple that were really getting hooked. They were fascinated by how starhopping is done, actually spending the time looking at the star patterns in the finder and moving the controls on the mount, (even though the automated scopes were cranking out things to look at far faster). They seemed interested in "the chase" and one could see the temptation to get their own scope rising throughout the night. Hope it sticks.

After the small number of the public left, I continued my first astronomical wanderings up the Milky Way from where I'd left off last time at the Trifid. (this started on Fri evening, and again on Sat. evening at Grant Ranch county park). Started by going west a bit and hunting up two clusters, 6568 and 6583. The former is OK but the latter is, IMO, really nice. It is small but packed in closely with stars.

Spent some time trying to find planetary 6578 but not doing so. I need some sort of help on small planetaries...anyone have some tricks? (I use a C8, if that makes any difference as to what to try). I don't have any trouble with the larger planetaries like the Ring or Bug nebulas, only the little ones.

Then it was on to M25, M23, M24. The first two weren't a problem, but M24 was impossible to pick out from the dense starfields around it. Then again, I have read since that M24 IS the whole star cloud. Tirion shows it as a small cluster, however. Who's right? M18 followed, and 6645. The former wasn't especially fine, but I found the latter quite nice. M17 was also a treat, showing the swan form very well. Next were M16 and H19, but I really couldn't say the latter stood out from the background in any greatly noticeable way. Somewhat sated with open clusters, I went over to a globular 6712 which is supposed to be very close to a planetary I.1295. Couldn't find it.

Back to the journey...there were a bunch more clusters, M11, 6683, 6704, etc. I was wearing out by this time. I did a couple of quick looks at the Ring and M13 to finish off the night and packed it in.

An amusing sidenote. At the county park, I could not find the main group who had gone off to Halley Hill. There was a certain pipe you had to know you could move out of the way...but my email server was down Sat. evening early and I didn't get the message in time. So I retreated to the usual place lower down, finding two astrophotographers and one guy with a 17" dob. And, the piggies. We had one boar, a couple of sows, and numerous piglets wandering around, softly grunting and snorkle-snorkling to each other. They came as close as 50 feet. Later on, the coyotes started singing, and the pigs (who got somewhat more agitated when they heard the howls) continued their serenade. So it was snorkle-grunt-Owooooo!!! grunt! grunt! Snorkle! Yeowwwooooo! Snorkel! Grunt! Snorkle! for most of the evening. Interesting.