I was next to Peter at Dino. I agree that it really improved up until I left around midnight. (too many committments the next day)
I dont think I have ever seen that many stars in Orion with unaided eye. Everything that can be visual was. The Auriega (sp) clusters were very prominent in binocs with some detail showing. The seeing was on the good end of the scale so Jupiter and Saturn were pretty good. Not the best I have seen but very good, nevertheless.
The real surprising thing, as Peter mentioned, was how dark it got and the limiting magnitude. Much darker than Coe. No wind. Mid 30's for temp.
Jay showed up with Pizza but no scope and I furnished dessert with Oreos. James Turley was there also and we did a little ep swapping. The gas planets seem to not take more than about 320x in my C11 and that may have been pushing it a tad. However, that is pretty good.
I took along my freq meter and disassembled the hand controller and calibrated the AC RA motor on my Ultima mount. Before dark we installed Bob's Nobs on James's C8 and collimated it. It has very smooth optics and gave decent rings at 32x per inch which is about as high as we could go early in the evening when we did the operation. We were using the glint of the sun on a car parked at the other end of the lot early on to get the collimation roughed in and as we were just getting it, I looked through the scope and No Spot. Looked up and my artificial star was driving away. :-) There was nothing else shiny around and the sun was setting so we had to resume that exercise later.
It was a very pleasent evening. The fee box was down when I went through. The ranger drove through to the boat ramp but never stopped.
There are just plain -no- lights around there. A couple of small light domes and you can see the lights along the dam far away but they are dim.
The milky way was obvious. One of the other nice things about this place is the lack of a tight windy road to get there. It is 71 miles from Los Altos.
Can you tell I like the place.??? At least until the spring/summer winds kick up. Peter was asking us to walk quietly, however, because he could see the footsteps in his tracking. So imagers should probably use anti vib pads.