Montebello

by Peter Santangeli


Well, Montebello turned out to be a pretty nice place to spend an evening tonight.

Arrived at about 8:45 to find Steve (with his HD150) and Rich. On my agenda was playing around with my Short Tube 80 on an EQ1 mount I just picked up at Orion. The other new toy was "The Sky" for Pocket PC (a Casio E-100 in my case) - a travel computer to go along with the travel scope above.

It was quite clear and steady (at least steady enough for the ST80). The milkyway was clearly evident. Not quite as good a Coe on a good night, but well worth the drive.

I spent the evening picking off a bunch of old Messier friends. M13, the Dumbell, the Lagoon, M20, M4, M10, and a few others (that I am forgetting). The toughest on the ST80 was M57. Just plain too small. Surprisingly, the best object was the dumbell. Lot's of definition for the small scope.

Steve's night didn't get off to quite as good a start. Seems that the CG5 his HD150 is on collapsed. One of the eyepiece tray arms just plain broke. Buyer beware on this one!

The Sky for Pocket PC turns out to be kind of neat. Its redraw speed is not zippy quick - sort of like running normal The Sky on a 486 laptop. The display is remarkably useful given its size. The worst problem seems to be that WinCE doesn't allow you to change the color of dialogs and menu's it creates, so any time you get a system dialog (or a menu up) WHAM! really, really bright. There is a night vision mode, but it can't effect the entire UI because of the above. Next stop, TAP plastics for a tiny red shield. Apparently you can hook it up to encoders or a goto mount as per the sky. I haven't tried that yet, but will when I get the right cable.

We didn't have the permit, but the ranger came by and didn't ask for it. He seemed happy to talk to us and warned us about approaching clouds.

Jay dropped by to say hello at about 10:30 or so. Seems he was trying some new bino's out by the Open Space Preserve.

I left at about 11pm, to return down to a completely socked in Los Gatos.

A good evening.