I *finally* had the opportunity to go observing last night, the first night since Lassen. The sky here in the Montreal area has been lousy, the only exception being Wednesday last week, and I spent that evening at my dad's place fixing his computer.

So in the afternoon, I called Yvon Halle'e (pronounced Halley :-) and asked him if he wanted to go observing. He said he couldn't because of prior commitments. It's so rare that we get a clear night here that we go on with our lives and make other plans and when we do get a good night, it catches us by surprise. Anyhow, Yvon said that another Yvon (Gravel), was going observing for certain. I called a couple of folks from the club here, and couldn't reach anyone. Oh well.

After work and dinner, I gathered my stuff, packed my car and drove out to our observing site. It's located about 40 minutes south of Montreal, on a federal government experimental farm. We have permission to go, we even built a heated shelter for the winter (we're not that fussy about warm air currents when it's minus ten outside).

I arrived at the site at around 8pm, and I could see a lovely thin-crescent Moon setting, with Venus nearby. When I arrived, Yvon G. was setting up his 10-inch Meade Schmidt-Cassegrain (not an LX-200, but it has the C.A.T. computer). I set up my 10" dob and waited for darkness to fall. I did take the opportunity to look at the Moon and Venus (it was way too low on the horizon and much too bright to see anything but a shimmering point of light).

I'm not a big Moon observer, but I can appreciate how lovely its craters looked.

Because there are tall grasses around the site and lots of trees, and ditches with standing water, there are lots of mosquitos. I sprayed myself with Off Skintastic (6.65% DEET) and they left me alone for the evening. Just as it was getting dark enough to start hunting for Herschels, another car pulled in. It was Yvon Halle'e! He had managed to tear himself free of his commitment and was coming along to look through our scopes (he didn't have time to pack his 8" SCT).

Yvon G. was having a big problem with his telescope, he couldn't align it properly. Both Yvon's worked on it all night, coming to the conclusion that the encoders were out of sync somehow, or that something inside was damaged. It always seemed to be off by 6 degrees.

At around 11:30pm, Yvon H. said that he hadn't seen a sky this clear in a long time. Not only could we not see M51 which was lost in Montreal's light dome, but the Milky Way was barely discernible (forget about its Rift!). Oh, how I miss Mark Wagner's backyard!!!

I nailed 4 new Herschels (NGCs 7044, 7142, 7160 and 7296). It's not many, but between helping the two Yvon's with the SCT, looking for Perseids (I saw a few nice, bright ones) and looking at Mars, Jupiter and Saturn with Yvon H.'s Meade super-wide angle 13.8mm, giving me 103.6X (Nice!), time flew by rather quickly. Yvon enjoyed trying to find objects with my dob (he has digital setting circles on his SCT), enjoying the "wonders" of a Telrad. ;-)

When I noticed the time (just after midnight), we decided to pack it in, and I got home, took a shower to wash off the DEET and was in bed by 2am... My 8am wake-up was rather rough... ;-)