My wife and I got the tour of Lick Observatory last night. The bad part was the awful traffic on the road up; it was all I could do to restrain myself as I had to park next to the jerk who drove 10-15 mph without pulling over for the last 5 miles.

But I couldn't resist a chance to view thru the venerable 36" refractor. That part was pretty disappointing, actually. The thing has a large amount of chromatic aberation making everything look out of focus compared to what I'm used to with the big refractors from AstroPhysics (it may have been slightly out of focus for me, too; we were not allowed to refocus).

The best part was the tour of the 120" Shane reflector. Factoid #1: the 120" mirror blank was a "leftover" test piece from the construction of the 200" Hale telescope on Palomar; Lick Obs. got it from Corning for only $50,000 ("the smallest amount the accountants thought they could get away with"). The mirror is relatively slow for a large telescope (I forget, exactly, f/4 or so) because the blank was too thin to cut a deep curve into.

We were supposed to get back outside in time to see the sunset and check for a green flash. But we ran late in the 120" control room. The Sun set about 10 seconds after I walked out the door so I wasn't really prepared. But I *think* I saw a bit of green at the right time. I certainly wouldn't have described it as a "flash", though.

After dark, we all saw three objects in the big refractor: M15, Jupiter and Epsilon Lyrae. M15 was about as expected: big and bright and kind of fuzzy. The eyepiece was a 35mm Televue Panoptic which gives about 500x on that scope (if I did the math right: 36 inch aperture (900mm) times f/19 = 17000mm focal length divided by 35mm). Jupiter showed a lot of false color and not much detail. Epsilon Lyrae was impressive, though. The close pairs were not just split, they were separated by HUGE gaping rivers of blackness. OK, at 2.5 arc seconds they are easy for even a very small scope but this did dramaticly illustrate the better resolution available with a big scope, even though the images weren't perfectly clean like we see with the "small" APOs at the Peak. Factoid #2: all four stars of Epsilon Lyrae are really a single system; the two pairs being separated by 13000 AU. Rem Stone, the Lick director of ops who conducted the tour, said that a fifth very faint star has also been discovered in the system.

It was a nice evening. The slow cars even pulled over to let me by on the way back down. I guess they were feeling a little more mellow by then, too ;-)