by Allan Keller
I had a great time Saturday evening at Sacramento Valley Astronomical Society's Henry Grieb Observatory situated in the Sierra Nevada mountains. I joined CK Lim, who's solar transit of Mercury photo was recently TAC's Astronomy Photo of the Day, Jim Ster and three others for the evening.
Seeing after moonset improved to 7/10, with transparency up to 7/10. Temperature dropped to 34 degrees. I had no problems with dew on my equipment nor did CK on his MakNewt. Saturn and Jupiter held up well at 440x in my 17.5 inch AstroSystems TeleKit dob-newt. I caught the Horsehead for the second time in my life using a H-beta filter. A couple of us stayed until about 4:30 am when the sky completely clouded over.
Earlier in the evening, at about 10:30 pm, a CHP helicopter flew over us and hit us with their multi-million candle power search light. Then they helped our dark adaption by switching the search light from a flood light to a spot light. What they saw was 6 guys surrounded by telescopes, their backs to the sky and hands covering their eyes. They flew around us once, decided we were no threat and flew off. Limiting magnitude immediately after the encounter was two moons... the real one and the one that was burned into our retina.