Brief report on Coe Friday night...

by Jay Reynolds Freeman

I expect I will do a longer write-up later, but as for Coe on 31 March 2000, for the sake of those of you who may be planning on coming up on April 1:

It was *very* windy before sunset and during twilight -- several telescopes were blown over, up through and including an 18-inch Obsession. Fortunately, I believe nothing was damaged.
The wind generally declined after dark, but there were occasional gusty periods at least through midnight. At one point early in the evening, I was the only person actually observing -- tell me again how SCTs are inferior to big Dobsons for deep-sky work, neener, neener, neener. Actually, one thing I thought to do that others did not, was to set up in the lee of my car; that made a great difference. Saturday attendees take heed.
The high cirrus that lurked for much of the day over the north and west sides of the Bay Area did not encroach after dark. (I got there about at sundown and was told that some of it had passed over earlier in the day.) Thus the sky stayed clear.
Unfortunately, the valleys also stayed clear, so there was plenty of light pollution.
Fortunately, the air was pretty dry -- my Radio Snack gadget reported 14 C and 25 percent relative humidity at midnight -- so the light pollution was not as bad as it might have been.
I believe that a great deal of Messier observing was done; however, Harvey and I were much too snobbish to go slumming with the masses, and did not look at a single Messier object.

Clear sky and happy, messy, marathoning...