I had a wonderful time up on Fremont Peak, just south of San Jose, California, Saturday night. Even though, at ground level, our food was being continuously threatened by a band of racoons and grey foxes, we amused ourselves with the deep sky above. One of our members' van was entered by a racoon taking out food. We had our hands full.

I operated my new "Sky Commander" Go To drive and siderial tracker retrofitted to my StarMaster 14.5, for the first time. My wishes for an accurate siderial tracking and object finding device attached to my Dob were answered. This system works great. It took a few minutes to align the scope to two stars at the onset and re-align once more, four hours later. I could now zoom in on M57 to study the planetary nebula and occasional central star at over 400x, without any object drifting out of view. I cranked up the magnification on a few other planetaries and close double stars to the scope's difraction limit and was pleased to have the object stay centered, indefinitely. I also opted to power slew to some chosen objects using the hand control while looking through the telrad finder--rather than using the "Go To" command all of the time. I would recommend this system to anyone who wants to track accurately at low or high power and have hand control (manual) or "Go To" capability. The computer has a multi-catalogue 9,000 object database.

I was blown away by Rich Neuschaefer's and Allen Nelm's apo refractor views of Jupiter and Saturn. Of Jupiter, the detail seen was too much to remember. The night's air wasn't up to par for my 14.5" aperture Dob to use fully. It was a bit mushy for that aperture to fully see the planets sharply. But, the 6" and 7" apo refractors cut right through this stuff and exposed so much detail, that I thought I was looking at these planets from above the atmosphere. I though the night's air was a bit hazy and bright, the moderate-sized apo's still lived up to giving great contrasty views. We followed the Jovian satellite's, Io, transit from ingress to egress across Jupiter's face, along with it's partially hidden shadow. Allen's FS150 Takahashi provided a sharp disk of Io with its sub-arc-second shadow tightly behind. The shadow looked crescent shaped. You could notice the movement of Io as if it was the minute hand of a clock. But, of course, the solar system is like a giant clock. Rich's AstroPhysics 180 EDT, also, showed high contrast views of Jupiter's belts and zones so well, that we could discern many white ovals within the southern equatorial belt and the southern temperate zone. A few festoons inside the equatorial zones and a long arched white area curving up against the GRS were obvious. I could watch this stuff all night.