Actually, the exceedingly small HVAG gathering was more of a cloud watching session than an astronomical one. The combined star party/Russian army winterizing session boasted 6 mildly insane people and two--count 'em, two--scopes. We may, however, have set a record for minimum aperture size for a star party (my C14 was the smaller one, the other was a 20" dob).
The weather dominated....it was pretty crisp, about 37 degrees, and we had bands of clouds. The seeing was kind of sad, except at the very end (just before the cloud bands coalesced to essentially cover everything). We lost the N. and W. part of the sky from sundown, putting the quietus to any observation of the nova in Aquila. I had also wanted to get a look at a globular with the C14, but M2 and M15 were similarly swallowed up by clouds.
Since the S. and E. were still open, we all looked at Jupiter and Saturn for a while but were somewhat unimpressed with the seeing. I looked at Capella again, trying to find absorbtion bands, but the seeing prevented anything but tantalizing hints of several of them, appearing extremely fleetingly but sharp when they were there. Someone had brought an old military binocular periscope, which was good for some mild fun. We also reminisced about last January's similar California-cold star party (but it was 26 degrees then, not the balmy 37 last night).
The group hung on, holding out for a Ionian shadow transit due to start at 1911.