I figured that Friday night would probably be the only night to get in some decent observing for the whole weekend so I cleared my work schedule for Friday and arrived at Fiddletown around 3:00 in the afternoon. Around 5:00 Bill Cherrington, a member of the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomer's (and an owner of the site property) arrived to keep me company.
I was all setup and ready to go when it started to get dark around 6:30. The first thing I noticed was that it took a lot longer for the Milky Way to pop out and that there was a horrendous dew forming. I kept all my books, charts, equipment and laptop covered with spare towels that I had brought up and thanks to my Kendrick anti-dew system I didn't have much trouble with the telescope or eyepieces.
I spent the first part of the night just cruising around looking at some of the Messier objects, in preparation for the Messier Marathon later this month. Bill and I also spent some time in a futile attempt to find Comet L3 which was supposed to be magnitude 12.5 but to no avail.
Then I got serious with my Herschel II list and started knocking off galaxies in Hydra and then in Leo. The conditions improved later in the night and I was able to see galaxies listed at magnitude 14.1 with averted vision - not bad for a 13 inch f4.5 Starsplitter Dob. I was using my new 22 mm Televue Panoptic for initial low power detection and then my 10 mm Radian for a high power view. I was really impressed with the 10 mm Radian. It seemed to have better contrast than my usual 9mm Nagler.
Bill Cherrington was a real inspiration to me. He's somewhere in his 70's and stayed up working along with me the whole night (He was using his 16 inch home-made Dob (excellent optics). We finished around 4:30 in the morning and both of us agreed that it had been a fun night. For me it was a great way to spend my 55th birthday.