Time for another of the one-man star parties, for a group of disabled coming up for a two-day rafting trip. They were scheduled to arrive Wed. and I figured I'd set up for Wed. night since no one would be worn out from the rafting yet. But, oh my, was it *hot*. We were all well wilted by the time the sun went down.

Conditions were pretty good early on, but degraded later. The seeing was quite steady, thanks (I think) to the big high pressure that was responsible for the cooking temperatures recently. And the transparency was pretty good, too, at first. Of course, as soon as Jupiter cleared the trees, the seeing went soft and we started to get some high clouds drifting in from the southwest. Naturally.

This was also the night that I tried out my new motor drive. Readers of my observing reports will no doubt be *shocked* that I, anti-automation-astronomer incarnate, have put a motor on my SCT. However, it really does make for easier showing of objects at public events, and since I seem to be doing a lot of that recently, it was inevitable. But only on right ascension! The DEC axis is still pristine, and I do have a manual clutch on RA so my star-hopping is still all knob-twiddling. The motor drive, by the way, worked just fine. Except for the idiotic GREEN LED the unit has as the power-indicator; and not just any green LED...oh no...they had to choose a bright one (now covered with duct tape).

But to the observing. Since the conditions looked promising, an early target was the Veil nebula. I used an OIII filter and it was quite easy to see as a set of grey patches. In some areas (eastern parts) it had some suggestions of the tendrils. If you removed the OIII filter, it was still visible--just--in a few of its more 'intense' patches. Had I not seen it before with the filter it would have been extremely easy to miss. Wary of averted imagination, I had some of the others look with/without filter as well, and they all agreed part of it were barely visible without the filter (or it was a mass hallucination).

This being a show-tell star party, I did my usual routine on spectra of Arcturus and Vega. With the steady seeing, the hydrogen lines on Vega were very obvious and Arcturus showed evidence of some lines as well. These were harder to pick out, being mostly a pair of V's (one at the top, one at the bottom of the spectrum) opposite each other. But occasionally the line would "appear" for a brief moment between the V's. As usual, people found the spectra fascinating.

Showed a number of galaxies (M101, M51, M63, M94, M31) to illustrate the variety and (secret agenda) to look at a couple of Messier objects I'd never gotten around to looking at before (63,94). M101 was a rather featureless grey patch; M51 had some faint hints of spiral structure as well as two obvious central cores ; M63 and M94 were again grey patches, but they seemed in some way "better defined" that M101. The series finished off with M31, both in binoculars and (the central third of it) in the scope. The two smaller satellite galaxies of M31 were also visible (scope).

There followed a few of the old favorites: M27, M57, M22, M13 while we were waiting for Jupiter to clear the trees.

Which it did, but about the time clouds were creeping in. There must have been some winds aloft pushing them along, as they moved pretty fast. In any case, the seeing would not really support 300X, and things were still pretty jittery at 225X. The moon came up not long after everyone ogled Jupiter, and the few still remaining (it was 1AM or slightly after, IIRC) were wowed by the view of craters at 225X. After that we all packed it in.