Report on Sunday at the Peak
By Jeff Crilly

Just a quick note on sunday night at Fremont Peak...

The clouds were in and out. It wasn't too bad, but a fair amount of the sky to the east and overhead was blocked out for the most of the night. To make things worse, the light from the towns to the west were reflected by the clouds.

Early on I took a look at M51. It was very dim, yet visible. I also managed a look at M101, also very dim; probably because of the light polution. It wasn't long before the clouds covered up most of Dipper portion of Ursa Major. At that point I was able to easily pick out M81/82. But the clouds got them too.

Since the west was pretty much eaten by light polution, I turned towards the east. M31 and its companion galaxies were an easy find; M31 was visible naked eye, but very faint. I picked up an Orion Deep Map 600 several weeks back, so I used that to track down some new objects. The little dumbell was an object that I had not seen before, and I managed to find that. I then checked at about a dozen or so very small glaxies in the constellations Perseus, Triangulum, Pegasus, and Aries. Included in these were the Pinwheel Galaxy (M33), which was dim yet visible.

Around 11pm or so I took a walk to the observatory where they were viewing Jupiter in 30" and having a astro photo slide show. I caught the end of the slide show. The high point was a bat flying around the room. Actually, the few slides I saw were fantastic.

Back at the sw lot, Jupiter seemed the object of choice. The seeing was in and out, though there were times when it was very good.

The high point for me was when Saturn got high in the southern sky (I think this was just before 3am.) I was viewing Saturn at about 110x and it was very clear and steady. So I tried out my highest power: 332x.. and I was very impressed. The seeing seemed to be very good. Occasionally there was a ripple -- typically when the wind would pick up. At 332x Cassini's division was more than obvious. I could also see some detail on the inner portion of the rings. Possibly this was the "Crepe" area of rings? Also clear were the yellow and cream bands on planet.

Most of us were packed up by 4am. As I was leaving I noticed the huge Orion constellation rising in the east. I would have liked to stay to explore it, but exploring the inside of my eyelids seemed more attractive.