by Ivor Barker
Eric met me at my house, the cloud cover was pretty thick, but looked promising on Radar, so we both drove up to Coe, I had Ben in tow as well. The overflow parking lot was pretty full of daytime users at 4.45 when we arrived, so we slotted in and waited for it to clear, the cloud cover started to disperse and there were alternating bands of cloud and clear. As the sun began to set and the parking lot began to clear the cloud also began to clear, now if only the wind would die down; my main target for the night was Mars so I was happy to wait.
We hung around chatting whilst drift aligning, some chap was there showing his Astrograph he had made and Ben was wizzing up and down the parking lot on his scooter, apart from that there was no one else there.
Drift aligning finished, the sky was becoming crystal clear, the wind unfortunately stopped me from doing any imaging with my SCT, Eric managed to rig up a normal camera lens to his CCD and was doing some wide field stuff around Virgo.
I collimated my dob and did some visual stuff, Polaris was a nice pair in my 17mm, M51 and its companion was striking, whisy spirals were standing out quite well, as the Moon was going down, I borrowed Erics OIII and had a great view of M16, M17 and M20, wow! the swan was really clear.
I did a wide field of M17 with my ShortTube-80 piggy-backed on my SCT and Mars was ready and waiting. I remarked to Eric how clear Mars looked considering there was still some clouds out to the East, and felt really silly when he reminded me that those "clouds" were the Milky Way! Summer has returned!
We finally finished up at about 2:30pm, the wind never died down, but a great night nevertheless.