Taking advantage of the brief break in the weather, I decided to do a little astronomy from my home in Boulder Creek, in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Although the conditions were not as good as I have seen it from this location (there was some haze/smoke, and the local light pollution was worse than normal due to my neighbors up the hill having a party), I was glad to be out under the stars. I was using my 6" f/8 Astro-Physics refractor on G-11 mount. I recently purchased the Losmandy pier extension and this was the first time I have been able to try it. I will say that it worked well, bringing the eyepiece up to a comfortable height wherever the telescope was pointed.

Since the conditions were not very good, I was limited to looking at brighter objects. Of course I started the evening out by looking at a well-placed M42. This object never ceases to amaze me. The field of view was filled with glowing streamers of nebulosity. The color seemed distinctly green to me. I was using a 26mm eyepiece, for a magnification of about 49X. At 116X, the field of view was filled with more detail than I could absorb. Next was NGC 1788, a bit of obscure nebulosity also in Orion. It was barely detectable in the 6" at 49X. It reminded me of a small Veil Nebula but was dimmer and more obscure. The Crab Nebula (M1) reminded me of a potato. I examined this object at various magnifications but could not see much more than a potato shaped blur of light. Moving on to Cancer, I looked for the pair of Galaxies NGC 2672/2673, at magnitudes 11.6 and 12.9 respectively. I could only see 2672 and this was tough due to the increasing haze. M 67 was a nice view at 49X and seemed to have a number of yellow stars. Gemini presented me with a number of objects. Of course M 35 (and the companion cluster but I can't recall its number) were very nice at 49X and I could fit both objects in the field of view. The planetary nebula NGC 2371 looked like a solid smoke ring, somewhat gray in color. This was in contrast to NGC 2392 that looked greenish to me.

About this time my neighbor wondered over and we looked at M 45, M 44, M 42, M 67, and M 35. By this time the haze was increasing and the Moon was rising so I called it a night. I would say the evening was a success, especially considering I had to walk down three steps to the observing area. And wouldn't you know it, it is raining today!