Welcome back to all those who travelled far and wide this past weekend in the search for darker skies! I wish I could have joined you, but work responsibilities kept me here in SF. The best I was able to do was a Thursday night excursion to Montebello. I have been putting off posting about it until I had a chance to look at my notes and put together a decent report, but time has been hard to come by this week and I figured a few off-the-cuff paragraphs would serve better than silence.

The main reason TAChyons might be interested in a report is that the evening was a good test of how good the site can be. Much of the Bay Area was fogged in that evening; my home in the Richmond district of San Francisco never saw sunlight at all that day, and as I headed down 280 the overcast was solid until down below the 92 interchange. The "breaking wave" fog formation familiar to anyone who drives 280 was rolling dull force over the ridges down to about Woodside Road, and as I headed up Page Mill in the twilight my headlights shown through thick, misty air. At the top of the steep part of Page Mill, the air cleared up, and that would be the last I would see of mist, fog, or dew until I was on my way home again.

Arriving at the main Montebello lot at about 9PM, I saw that another skygazer was already on hand. This turned out to be Tom Moutoux (hope I spelled that right!), who had been to the previous week's TAC event at Montebello and is on the Announce list, but not, I believe, this mailing list (are you out there, Tom?).

Tom had his new Celestar 8, nicely accessorized by the folks at the Orion store in Cupertino, and I had my Ranger. We started out by taking a look at Mars, which is now discouragingly tiny but still revealed its markedly gibbous phase and polar cap to Tom's 8". We bided time through the twilight with standby doubles like Albireo, and as darkness fell turned our attentions to the rapidly sinking galaxies of Coma and Virgo. The Sombrero showed up nicely in the Ranger, and the Celestar showed the dark dust lane with moderate difficulty. Next came NGC 4565, and a tour of many of the brighter galaxies in that region before they sink into the dusk. By 10:30 the summer Milky Way had become clearly visible, and the rich objects it contains held our attention for the rest of the evening. Among the highlights for me was the view of the compact globular M80 in the Ranger. Though appearing very small, it made an impressive sight with many resolved stars superimposed upon a nebulous central ball. M22 was brighter and also showed stars across the core. Most of the night was spent in a leisurely stroll amongst the brighter objects, as I found it interesting to compare the appearance of things I had seen previously through larger scopes with the view in the 70mm Ranger.

We finished up by looking at Jupiter, which appeared impressively big compared to tiny Mars. The views in the Ranger and 8" were similar, as Jupiter was too low in the atmosphere for Tom's bigger aperture to provide much benefit. In moments of steadier seeing, we were able to see 4 or 5 belts and decide for sure that the GRS was not facing the Earth.

The sky appeared darker than on any of my previous sessions at the MPROSD sites. At about midnight, before turning my eye to blinding Jupiter, I did a couple of limiting mag counts among the stars high in the Southwest. I got down to 5.9 consistently, which is within a couple of tenths of where I rated Fremont Peak last Saturday night. (I suspect a keener eyed observer would have done better at both sites.) Subjectively, the Milky Way appeared richly textured from the large Sagitarrius star cloud up through Cygnus; the North American nebula region east of Deneb was distinctly blotchy, and the Altair rift was dramatically obvious. M13, along with M8, M 6 & 7 were glimpsed with direct vision. M51 and companion were definitely spotted in my 40 year old 7x50 binocs. In short, it was pretty dark. I suspected that more fog had closed in below, masking the skyglow somewhat, though as I drove down Page Mill at about 1:00 I found it mostly clear. Though heavy fog was visible at twilight over the ridges to the north-west, not more the 3 or 4 miles away, Montebello stayed perfectly clear, dry, and dew-free until we left at a little before 1.

Having observed now from both the main and auxiliary lots at Montebello, I have to cast my vote for the main. There is a lot more room, it is easier to find, the surface is nicer, and headlights are actually less of a problem. Though we were set up very near the road, the topography keeps car lights and observers' eyes fairly well separated.