Getting an early start last friday evening, I arrived at Pacheco SP at 6:30 and talked with the Ranger for awhile awaiting the last day guests to leave. There are a few new improvements coming to the park, including a pay phone this year. Got set up and started with M42. It has been awhile since I was behind the eyepiece, and this felt great. Then started on my list of faint planetaries. Nine entries from the PK catalog were viewed, in Orion, Canis Minor and Major, and Cancer and Gemini. The three that were of note were PK 219+31.1 in page 187 of U2000. When you go to this page, it is easy to find this nebula, since it is a huge symbol. The actual view, at 50x was the highest magnification possible , while keeping the field wide enough for the object and some dark around it for integration. With a OIII filter, this object appears like a big faint international DON'T symbol, a circle with a slash through it. PK 224+15.1 (pg230) was also showing a ring structure. The rest varied from puff balls, to merest detection of presence. I viewed M1, 44 and 67 during these searches, on the way to the smaller PN's, as well as NGC 2022, a nice planetary up near Orions neck. Two small emission neb were observed from the Cederblad catalog (CED) and they were ced 62 and 59. These objects almost always occur in very beautiful fields and accompany dark nebulae, or open clusters, or other nebulae. Ced 59 sits in the inner curve of a dark nebula Barnard 35, which in turn sits inside a very rich field that is almost open cluster density. B35 is kidney bean shaped.

The sky Friday night was very clear, with some 6.2 mag stars out and no dewing. The breeze was off and on all night and was not very cold. Session ended with moonrise. I observed solo :-( Saturday looked iffy , with lots of high stuff but looked clear to the south, so I went. No ranger there , but a good sized day crowd was packing up, lots had been taking pictures of the big patches of yellow wildflowers on the hills around the park.

The clearness was not the same as on friday, a big jet trail seemed to hang forever in the dusk sky, and lots of stuff to the north. I was hard-pressed to find a 6.0 star , but the south was clear enough and improved after the first 2 hours or so. There were seven more PK's to see, the best being pk231 +4.1. This is in the same field, even at 100x, as M46. Now m46 already has one planetary in it, NGC2438, and the PK is just above the edge of m46 , about 15" away. It is a puffball with a central star seen. Also viewed CED 90, a little tuft perched on the end of a long NGC and IC neb complex.

Got tired of planetaries for awhile so dropped into Virgo for some DISTANT light, such as M87, 84,90, 91, 94, and about 20 more. About 11-ish, I stopped and took awhile to do something I have not done in a long time, layed out on a picnic table there, and just watched the meteors go by. Packed up about 1:00 am. The air had been dead calm all night, and dew had started to form by midnight, and there had been some mosquitos the first hour. Observed solo again.

In answer to Mark's question, I did not see any permanent BBQ pits out at Pacheco. There's room to grill a brontosaurus there if we wanted to (dinosaur point rd!).