Last Saturday a number of us (30 ?) in TAC set up in the southwest parking lot at Fremont Peak state park (about 70 miles south of San Jose, California). People were also set up behind the ranger's house, up by the observatory and along Coulter row.

It was hot, some of got to the Peak in the early afternoon. It's fun getting there early but it makes for a long night if you want to observe the Jupiter, Saturn and the Moon.

Early in the evening we observed Mercury. It was low but was clearly in about a 1/4 phase. The next object I tried was the Double Double in Lyra. The seeing was reasonably good. I got a clean split with each star showing a nice airy disc. All four components of Nu Scorpio split cleanly too. The companion of Antares was easy to see although occasionally the seeing would boil make the companion fade into the brighter star for a few seconds.

I looked at most of the big bright objects then started looking for small NGC globulars. Taking breaks and looking through the other scopes was fun as always. One of the observers was hunting down planetaries with her 12.5" Dobs. She pointed it at Neptune, it showed a very sharp, clear blue green disc.

When Jupiter cleared the trees one of its moons was just a small bump on the limb. The seeing was ok but more than about 300x really wasn't very helpful. The contrast was also not as good as on some nights. The NEB showed a number of lumps. The SEB was split with a white area. It looked like the white area in the SEB was made up of several small white ovals. There was a long thin festoon coming down from the NEB and curving into the EZ. As it got later in the morning the first festoon has moved ("refractor left" ) and another was coming into view there were two dark bars on the lower side of the NEB.

I started to make a sketch but by that time I was just too tired to really try to concentrate closely enough to do justice to the amount of detail shown.

When Saturn got high enough the three rings were easy to see along with the Cassini division. The was a dark band across the planet. Some people were counting the moons, I think they saw 5. It will be good when Jupiter and Saturn are up earlier.

I really would have liked to make a more careful observation but it was getting to be a very long night even by the time Jupiter came up. The heat in the afternoon really makes really makes it difficult to feel very alert late into the night.

We did look at the moon. There were some interesting shadows near the terminator caused by peaks, making dark lines into the terminator.

It was a fun night.

Equipment: AP 180mm f/9 EDT APO refractor. For planetary viewing I was using a Maxbright mirror diagonal and 8mm Brandon eyepiece, a 12mm Brandon and 2x Celestron barlow. When not using the mirror diagonal I used a Zeiss binoviewer with 3x barlow and 25mm and 16mm Zeiss Abbe Orthos.