After seeing the 'where-to-go?' traffic on TAC, I decided on Dino for the night. So did many others. Jay turned up with more pizza than he knew what to do with.
I started with solar system objects - the sun, Jupiter and Saturn. The sun had quite a few spots including one large group. Jupiter and Saturn were about as good as they're going to be as low as they were. Then, I got Comet Linear 2001/A2, which showed a hint of tail in the C8. It was obvious how you could mistake a galaxy for a comet, but the charts showed no bright deepsky objects in the area.
Once it got properly dark, I started to work on my Herschels. I'm in Downtown Virgo now, so navigation is an issue. Just because you find a galaxy, you can't assume it's the one you're after. What I did was to segregate the objects on the page I was working on according to the Uranometria chart on which they fall, then sort by dec within each set. Thus, once I started a chart, I could star/galaxy hop from object to object within each chart and not have to worry about the accuracy of my circles. The bright M-objects often served as starting points. 1-1/2 more pages to go and I'm out of galaxy country and into glob territory.
The wind was constant, eliciting a low whine from the windmills on the ridge. It got rather chilly. By the time I left, my windshield was dewed but the Wagner Special dewshield kept the corrector dry.
After doing a page of Herschels, it was time for a break and some eye candy. By that time, the big globs were up. I also found Cen A. Unfortunately, we're missing those few degress of S horizon which would have made Omega Cen possible the way it is at Coe or Montebello.
I met up with a couple of guys (Patrick and Gene) who were still comparatively new to this, so I was able to make like an expert and show them some of the summer objects just coming up. They hadn't been aware that a small scope could pick up M17, but they won't forget it now. It was nice meeting my summertime friends after the long winter.
By then, it got to be 4:00 AM and time to pack up. As I was doing so, somebody came up with full headlights glaring. It turned out he was a fisherman who wanted to take advantage of a moonless night. Seems that when there's no moon, the fish can't see to feed, so they're hungry by daybreak. He saw all these cars and thought he'd missed an Important Fish Advisory of some sort. I explained why we were here and showed him some stuff through binox, my C8 being in the process of being taken down. He was suitably impressed with the Butterfly cluster and the Milky Way and apologized for the headlights. Maybe we'll see him again, with scope. He had had a plan to float across to the dam, but that went away once he saw how far it was. As I was packing, he told me some wildlife encounter stories. Jay isn't the only one to see a mountain lion up close!
I left at ~4:45 to go home and grab a little sleep.