left town with high hopes of good weather, pulled into chews ridge at 1:30 thurs. the county was grading the last 3 miles of road, it was great fun driving my truck over piles of dirt and rocks... set up everything and waited for dark. it was windy, gusts from 20-30 mph, happy to say that the 1200 mount was solid as a rock. considered tying a rope to mikes' ngt 18 and flying it like a kite... seeing was fair, after using the a-p polar scope and aligning, used my lumicon sky vector d.s.c. and all objects were in my c11 eyepiece at 175x. i am very happy with the mount, all movements were very smooth and i could position it anywhere using only one hand. photos were out since the wind was roaring, decided to look at mainly bright objects on the messier list. temp was 38, but with the wind, probably around 30. on fri night, the wind was a bit better, still gusting 10-15 mph, seeing was definitely crappy. while cooking up some dinner under the tarps, mike was yelling about satellites so we started watching. while observing the area above vega over to arcturus, we saw within several minutes (around 9:45 pm) about 10 satellites going different directions. several brightened nicely (iridiums?) and we watched one disco-ball tumbling across the sky. at about 9:59, below arcturus about 20 degrees, the mother of all iridiums lit up. mike and i approximated its, value to be about -5!!! easily brighter than venus, it cast a shadow on the ground and we saw it shining off my telescope tubes! unfortunately, that was to be the high point of the evening... sat dawned beautiful and calm, hopes were high. around 4:00 to 6:00 pm, we were getting fogged out! i've never seen fog at chews, and was thoroughly demoralized... by sunset however, the skies were clear, and since the fog was several hundred feet below us, the skies were darker that i had experienced at chews. seeing was very stable, totally excellent!! fired up my st4 and started testing the tracking. unfortunately, the unit was still doing its' old trick of correcting when no corrections were needed, slowly driving off center in r.a. tried for several hours, moving, testing, tweaking, all to no avail. guess i'll call sbig on tues and try to get help. decided to hand guide after all that and with the a-p having such good drives, barely had to correct at all! shot several pictures from 1 hr to 1 1/2 hr long. finally at about 4:00 am the sun glow was apparent in the east, looked at jupiter and called it a night. decided to pack it out on sunday due to the weather. all in all though, the worst night observing still beats being in town!