Last night was a very nice time at Montebello.
There were about 5 cars there. Started drifting out about 11. It seemed to be the shootout of the spotting scopes. The leica was giving -great- images and so was the one that Alan had (german make, cant remember the name). Pinpoint stars and the images were Right Side Up. Very confusing. Both seemed to have good light throughput and it makes me wonder why we cant have decent erect image diagonals for astro scopes. There were no detectable (by me) abberations that I see with add on erect image diags.
I had the ST80 out and have decided to collimate it. It has good potential but needs some internal blackening and collimation.
There was no wind and the temps stayed in the low 40s and eventually dropped to the high 30s. No moisture either. I had to take off my heavy coat as I was sweating inside of it. Seeing was pretty good also. Steady.
The highend spotting scopes were really an eyeopener. Alans has been moded to take 1 1/4 eps and was doing extremely well at some respectable powers.
My lesson learned for the evening is that when you look through someone elses scope and want to find it in yours, when you go back to your own, please remember -which- stars were the pointers you identified. Couldnt figure out for a half hour why I couldnt find this colored double. Later I ran into it by accident and realized I was keying off the wrong stars.
With a partial moon out it was relatively bright but still very pleasant.