Fremont Peak 3/29
By Mike Shade

Ah, what a difference a day makes. I arrived at Fremont Peak in the early afternoon on Sunday 3/29. I decided to bring my NGT-18 out to play with some spring galaxies. I was soon joined by John Hales and his numerous varieties of cheese. The weather did not look promising: there were big ugly clouds over the Peak and there was a rather chilling breeze blowing. We were soon joined by other hopeful observers and soon there was an impressive number of telescopes present: three 18s, a 15, a 14.5, an 11, and a 10" rounded out the collection. Towards dark the clouds dissipated and the wind died down; it looked like it might be a good night. After some initial equipment adjustments, it was time to start hunting. I was using my laptop and running The Sky, hooked up to the encoders on the telescope. When the scope moved, the cursor moved on the screen following the motion of the telescope exactly. This seemed to work pretty well and helped me to find some interesting objects. Spring is the time for galaxies and the list that follows is only a partial list of the objects I observed. NGC 3489 at magnitude 11.3, 4395 at magnitude 10.7, 4676 and 4676B, known at "the mice" glowed at approximately magnitude 14. 4656 was a nice edge on galaxy with 4657 very near. 4534 was large but very dim. 4662 was almost perfectly round and 4145 was very large but with a low surface brightness. An interesting object was UGC 7175 at magnitude 15. It seemed somewhat brighter than its stated magnitude. I also looked at a few Messier galaxies including M60, M49, M100, M99, and M51. I also looked at the globular cluster M3 at 842X (2.5 Vixen LV eyepiece). While this was a bit much magnification, it was interesting because the object more than filled the field of view! NGC 4762 was a nice edge on galaxy. For most of my puttering I used a 22mm Panoptic for about 93X or so. For those who stayed home and were frightened by the clouds, you missed a very nice evening. The fog came in about 1:30 or so making the sky somewhat darker. The last observer quit about 3:00 or so but by this time I was sleeping in the truck dreaming of warm Summer nights (it was in the upper 30s at the Peak).