by Jeff Crilly
It was a pretty good night... transparancy wasnt super (as expected)... seeing was so so.. maybe a 3, but I did manage to see some detail on mars.. occasionally the stars would turn to blobs.. At the southwest lot there were maybe 10 scopes or so... much less crowded than on 5/19... the wind was negligible.. and it was warm until maybe 3am.
When we arrived around 7pm the fog was in, however santa cruz and northern monterey bay were in the clear. While waiting for the moon to set I noticed that the lights of monterey (?) were visible, but not from the southwest lot.
There was an occasionaly whif of cloud passing over, but nothing to interrupt observing. However, transparency was affected. Eventually around 3am we got a decent milky way.
Some observing highlights.. After moonset I started observing galaxies in hercules since it was in a good position, up near the zenith (ngc 6207 was easy). In Leo Minor we observed ngc 3395-96 which are an interesting pair of interacting galaxies, in addition to their neighbors ngc 3424/3430. ngc 4565 at 142x was pleasing as usual, as were the veil and swan with the OIII. The trifid was a bit ho-hum.
Around 4:30 or so, m31 was up, and pegasus was rising. ngc 7331 was the last object of the night, and was still visible as the sky was starting to lighten.
Most folks were gone; two other observers were sleeping. As the dawn was breaking I headed up the peak with the camera and got some interesting shots of the fog, the observatory, and the sunrise... (fyi, the first of these is a sunset)... http://albums.photopoint.com/j/AlbumIndex?u=719470&a=13059715