Saturday afternoon was clearing, with a few puffy clouds wandering around, and breezy, while the various parts and pieces of the C14 setup were loaded into the truck. When I got to Grant Ranch, the number of clouds had decreased (yes!) but the breeze was up. This implied possible phooey seeing but turned out to be a false indicator, at least for later in the evening. Wetness there was, no surprise after Friday's rain, and the ground was soft--in some spots muddy. Dew was expected, and it started to show up in quantity after 10PM. It was a bit chilly early before the breeze died away, but then seemingly warmed up later on.
We had rather few scopes for the first new moon without rain in 4 months(!). I remember one 14" SCT, one 10" dob, 1 8" SCT, 1 5" ETX, and one 90mm ETX, plus a tripod-mounted pair of 20X80's. A few visitors came by after finding internet notices of the event, and two of the scope owners came complete with friends, so we had a fair number of people wandering around viewing things. The expected large number of girl scouts did not arrive, because they had evidently cancelled their weekend outing due to the Friday rain and were not in the park as a result.
The moisture in the atmosphere was both blessing and curse. Blessing because evidently enough haze/fog formed in the Santa Clara valley to snuff out a large part of the light dome from the cities. Curse because it may have been somewhat less transparent than usual to the east. You could see all the stars of the Little Dipper, and I was able to find M101 later on, so the limiting mag. must have been pretty good.
The observing started with spectra of the usual suspects, Sirius and Betelgeuse, with the usual spiel and the usual oohs-and-ahs from the viewers. Sirius showed H-beta easily, with H-gamma and H-delta popping in and out with the seeing. Betelgeuse showed a number of molecular lines. Other scopes started by showing Jupiter and Saturn. I wasn't going to repeat that, but one of the other scope owners wanted to see what bigger aperture did. The views of both gas giants were thoroughly limited by the bouncy seeing. I.e., not much detail visible.
M3. Hadn't seen a big globular for a while, so I went and looked this one up. Very nice. Very nice indeed. The seeing was still a little soft, so it didn't have that really crisp sparkle effect, but still a fine sight after months of photon deprivation!
Nearby to M3 are galaxy 5375 and another globular, 5466. The former was out for the evening, but the latter was found. It is fairly large but faint; with averted vision, some individual stars winked in and out, but generally it was a soft greyness thicker in the center than at the edges.
Some of the assembled multitude were observing the shuttle and space station pass to the SW when a very bright meteor, leaving a trail, blazed to the west. (This observer happened to be facing east with eye glued to eyepiece at the time, darn it.)
Going pretty much straight north from 5466 leads to a group of galaxies more or less centered around a 6.5 mag. star. This is a fun spot in the sky if you like galaxies and the targets are pretty easy to find. Put the 6.5 mag. star in the center of your field of view, and you have three galaxies right around it: 5350, 5353, and 5354. The first of these is the most obvious; the other two are smaller and seem to overlap each other. Nearby are 5355 and 5358, but these are much smaller and neither was seen. Not too far away is 5371, the largest of this bunch but somewhat harder to see. In the opposite direction from 5371 are three more galaxies, 5326, 5313, and 5311. 5326 and 5313 are easy to spot, but 5311 is darned faint. I missed it entirely at first but another viewer thought he saw something. More magnification brought 5311 out better, but it was never what you'd call obvious. You did not have to use averted vision (once you knew where to look), but it was much more evident that way.
While I and my eagle-eyed visitor were thus pursuing faint fuzzies, other scopes were hunting brighter galactic prey. Eventually this led to emissaries from the other scopes coming by asking to see M51 with more aperture. So off we went further north. Seeing had settled down by now, and it was a very fine view indeed. Spiral structure was evident to everyone, leading to a fun "which way do you see it rotating" discussion. CCW outvoted CW by 4 to 2 (CCW is correct).
I went off to M63, but by the time I'd gotten there, everyone had gone off to other scopes, so I ogled it and then took a break to just sit back and look at the sky for a while and relax while the heavens wheeled overhead
Hercules was up, so I went for M13. Seeing had really improved since the look at M3, and M13 was as sharp and sparkly as I've ever seen it. Magnificent. Other viewers drifted back and got views as well. Curiously, no "wows"; all who viewed it were rather hushed upon looking into the eyepiece.
Dew was killing off the other scopes now, mostly via fuzzing out eyepieces and finders. I took a flyer and went for M101, generally quite hard to find so close to town. But there it was, a soft grey cloud.
The three of us left packed it in at 11:45 or so. Dew was beading up on my star chart and starting to drip off the metal bodies of the finder scopes by now. By the time everything was put away, all the others had gone. I paused to revel in the quiet glory of the cathedral of the sky, and then went home.