There are about 21 scopes up here. There are also some high clouds... Temp is 64 and humidity is 63%.
Nice evening, however.
A little later, the temp dropped to 62 then climbed to 66 with the humidity at 24%. Dew heaters - Ha - we needed ground straps.
The sun had a very large group of sunspots in the upper left corner. There were others but this one group had 20 to 30 members. The 48mm Gary Russell ep was very good in this regard, allowing the whole sun in the SCT with room to spare. The seeing was steady and the pattern on the nonsunspot surface (over 50 and you lose your nouns) showed very clearly in the Baader filter.
I went up with a 4 page list of doubles but didnt get very far. Did split porrima with the C11 at about 225x (1.3 or so arc seconds). The seeing was very good and steady. There were periods where it would disintegrate but came back pretty quickly. Paul Sterngold was there with his modified 13inch coulter and we shared some views. Also spent a fair amount of time looking over Richard Ns ccd activities.
There were light clouds early on but they mostly dissappated as it got dark. The light dome from SJ was considerable but around 1 or 1:30 a light fog blanked out a considerable portion of the light allowing the milky way to show off quite handsomely.
While cruising around in the Milky Way with no particular purpose, I rediscovered the Wild Duck Cluster. I must have some attraction to it because it seems that everytime I am just looking around, I stumble on it and then look it up and then say to myself, been here,done that, and wonder why I cant remember what it looks like.
While Richard was lining up on M57, I noticed the central star was showing up in his 1 sec alignment exposures so I trained the C11 at it and stared at it for a long time but could not make out any trace of the central star.
The experiment for the evening was to use the scope as a cell phone antenna. This was suggested to me when I read of a long distance transmission with 250 mw at 18 ghz using an SCT. Coe is notorious for having spotty cell phone connections (line of sight but long way) so I trained the scope on San Jose and stuck the antenna of the pcs (1.8 ghz) into the baffle tube with the diag removed and -nothing-. However, when I backed off the distance that the eyepiece would be (the focal point of the scope) which is about 6 inchs from the scope, the bar meter on the phone went band edge. I made a call to home to test it and it worked like a champ. Aluminum mirrors do a great job on rf. Not an on topic subject but interesting nevertheless.
It was a great night. Getting too hot at 2am was a real treat. I left about 3:20 and evidentally just missed the raccoon incident. It was much colder down in the valley.