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Fremont Peak was a little wet but we had clear skies. It was the first night of good seeing I've had with my 155 f/7 EDF and I was having fun. While looking at Saturn, Bill Arnett called out the "GRS is transiting". I had forgotten to look at Jupiter and sure enough there was the GRS, very nice.
Saturn showed very nice shading, the three rings and the Cassini division were easy to see. There was a little bit of the shadow from the planet on the back side of the rings. It looked like you could see a dark "outline" of the rings against the planet which I think was the shadow from the rings.
I looked at several of the brighter deep sky objects. M42 was beautiful as always. It was easy to see six stars in the Trapezium.
It was the first time I had used the Maxbright star diagonal and the Zeiss Abbe Ortho eyepieces when we had good seeing. They are supposed to have very little scatter. Even bright stars looked smaller. Rigel was bright but it seemed small and its little companion was very easy to see. There seemed to be more "black" between the companion and Rigel.
Clouds started coming over sometime after about 1am. Later in the morning we talked to one of the park's staff and found out the Peak has a new ranger. The gate to the Observatory is locked but the ranger will give the combo to the FPOA.
It looks like we can still have star parties behind the ranger's house but the shop may stay locked. One very sad note, we heard the trees behind the restroom have some form of bark beetle and will have to be removed, darn. I hope the problem doesn't spread to the trees so the south of the restroom.