My wife and I were invited up to a friend's home in the Mokelumne Hill area. We went to the Frog festival in Angel's Camp on Saturday (hot and not that interesting) but the evening at their home was great.
They are at 2950 ft elevation and have really really dark skies. Unfortunately they have a lot of trees on their mountain top home, so finding a suitable hole that permitted visibility of Polaris and offered a reasonable swath of sky was a bit challenging. I suggested to Marc that he should put his chainsaw to work but his wife had a very pained look on her face upon hearing that suggestion. We all had a good laugh over it anyway.
Due to the trees, we never got a chance to see M57 because we were all drained from the Frog festival and heat that went along with it so we quit earlier than I would have initially expected when we set out on Sat morning. Nearly 100 degrees at the festival and lots of dust and slimy biker types sort of detracted from the otherwise rather silly spectacle of competitive frog jumping. The 4H and FFA animal exhibits were very nice, but the poor pigs and sheep were about to die from the heat. I did see what must have been the biggest chicken in the world and a pair of chickens with what would best be described as looking like Phyllis Diller on a bad hair day.
Back to the observing, we did see a totally awesome view of M3 and M51. M3 was sparkling like a cluster of diamonds according to my wife, who I think was hinting around about some thing she thinks I should buy her after she's seen all the credit card bills for the astro gear in the past few months.....
But everyone was quite blown away by the beauty of these objects. All had read the May 2001 Scientific American article on old stars and so had been already taken aback by the sheer beauty of a Globular Cluster. So seeing one live and in person was especially fun for all.
We also logged M104, but the Sombrero was a bit dim, perhaps he was ready for a siesta. After all it was a long day.
One thing that was totally unexpected were the large number of satellites we were seeing. It seemed that everytime I moved to a new object, that while getting aimed, there would go another one. I shouldn't be surprised; there must be hundreds if not thousands of them up there buzzing by every interesting star in the sky.
The CM1400 did a great job splitting Castor and everyone really enjoyed Mizar, a relatively easy double.
I had a lot of fun with my night vision scope too. It really is a great tool for putting on the back end of the finder scope. It makes finding things so much easier than simply using the Digital Setting Circles only. Marc was totally taken in by sky searching with the NV device. Being a car racing fanatic, he was really jazzed about hunting for satellites. The guy just can't seem to get away from high-speed man-made objects!
We lost the wives about 10:30pm and by midnight Marc and I were about to throw in the towel, when we saw Mars rise up. Well that called for another 15 minutes of sheer joy. Even though it was very low in the sky and the heat from their roof caused it to shimmer quite a bit, we had a great time admiring its Orangish appearance. I was hoping I could last a couple more hours, as I really wanted to see M57 with truly dark skies and it was about 45 minutes away from getting above the trees, but between our fatigue and the mosquitoes, we called it a night about 12:15 or so.
Clearly the highlight for me was the amazing intensity of M3 under truly dark skies. The Night Vision scope was a lot of fun for sweeping the sky with and if we saw five, we must have seen 20 satellites through it. We also saw five or so meteors too. M3 darn near blew out our eyeballs because it was so bright. Understanding that I am comparatively new to the hobby (first scope in Nov 2000), this was my first real outing that gave skies darker than I get in San Jose.
We're all hooked for good now!