For a balmy just-after-new-moon evening in early June, there were surprisingly few telescopes at Grant Ranch last night: 2 8" SCT, 1 5" ETX, 1 8" dob, 1 20" dob, and 1 14" SCT plus perhaps a couple of others I missed as they set up later. I suppose some people may have been scared off by the cirrus clouds that were around, but they dissipated later. Ground temperatures were very nice, and the seeing was reasonably steady all evening. The sky was rather "bright" however, even to the east, and that probably meant there was a fair amount of water vapor in the air up high. It didn't really get "dark" until after 9:30. Dew started showing up in earnest around 10 to 10:30 PM.
The evening's festivities started off with the very thin crescent moon; even with its being quite low the view was reasonably steady with plenty of craters to wow the assembled multitude (the campgrounds at Grant Ranch were filled and there had been a large wedding in the park in the afternoon as well). By the time the moon had vanished into the trees on the western horizon, Arcturus was out, and I looked at its spectrum (hints of a absorbtion band or two, but that's all), and Vega's (H-beta and H-gamma easily visible) and Antares' (some molecular bands visible), for a while. This attracted a number of visitors.
Highlight of the evening was Y Canes Venatici, a carbon star. Its spectrum looked as if whole slabs of it had been excised; the molecular absorbtion bands were very distinct and far more obvious than with either Betelgeuse (in season) or Antares. It was a little dim, being only about 6th magnitude (at best....it is variable) but you could still see color in the spectrum. Without the diffraction grating, it looks deep orange in the eyepiece, not a real red.
On the way to Y C.V. I stopped by M51 during the star hop. With averted vision, the spiral structure of the larger galaxy was just discernable, something confirmed by a couple of other observers.
Went off on a couple of my usual vampiric photon tours of the other scopes and got views of various globulars (one observer was 'doing' the Ophiuchus- Saggitarius globulars this evening--busy man), the Ring, some galaxies in Leo, etc.
Second highlight of the evening, M13. With the steady seeing, it supported up to 300X and completely filled the eyepiece view with stars. M13 also attracted visitors. One in particular was an auto mechanic; highly relaxed after a few beers, this fellow didn't care much for M13, but just could not get enough of the NJP160 mount. Some people really appreciate things mechanical, and he was having a high old time inspecting the equatorial head and waxing poetic over it. We got into a discussion about the gears, which quickly drove away everyone else :-)
Things began to quiet down after that, and I took a break to lie down in the grass and just watch the sky for a while.
The last act of the evening was to hunt up the Ring nebula. I must have been getting tired, because I lost it. There is nothing deadlier than overweening pride ("Look at the star chart? Bah! I know where it is...why, I found it a dozen times last summer!"), which lead to a fair amount of wasted time. Thorougly deflated, I eventually referred to the star chart and, of course, it popped up at once. (Whew, they won't come to take away my amateur astronomer's card, after all :-).
It got to be 12:30 and tiredness set in. Time to go.