I was at Fremont Peak again on Monday 25 August, 1997. The marine layer over the coastal plain and off shore appeared thicker than it had been on either of the two preceding nights, but the wind stayed fairly calm, so the fog and cloud showed no tendency to move upslope and engulf the park. It was warm enough for much of the evening that I did not need either hat or jacket, though it got a little cooler and breezier near midnight.

I had my Intes six-inch, and chased down another bunch of objects on my "Herschel 2514" list. Most were galaxies, but not all -- NGC 7076 is a small, faint nebulous patch in Cepheus, and NGC 7067 is a tiny open cluster only a few degrees from M39. Some of the open clusters that Herschel found are listed non-existent in recent versions of the NGC, but there is an "object" of some sort at the position, perhaps a real cluster lost against background stars on deep plates, or a chance association of a few stars.

I looked at Jupiter and Saturn at about midnight; I just missed the double transit that several others reported, but saw the two moons nearly merged, off to the side of the planet. Seeing was pretty good.

I was not alone in the southwest parking lot: Two TAC newcomers showed up with a new 10-inch Meade equatorially-mounted Newtonian. They were having trouble polar-aligning, the mount being a little wobbly. I only looked through their telescope briefly -- it gave a nice view of the Dumbbell Nebula, M27.

On the way back down the road, I saw a gray fox, an opossum, and -- on the flats nearly all the way to the outskirts of San Juan Bautista -- two deer, trotting across the road and leaping the agricultural fencing with grace and ease.