by Julius Szakacs
It was 10:30PM when I got to Del Valle and I parked close to the entrance of the maintenance road.
There were a half a dozen cars all ready parked around me and I seen a few as I drove on Mines Rd. to the sight.
I had my TV pronto with me, mounted on my Tasco goto mount. After I setup, the news spread around that there is a telescope setup, looks like I was the only who had one and people came over want it to see it. There was a nasty slow moving cloud spread around the northern section of the sky till midnight, but we were able to have a nice view of the planets, Orion nebula and some clusters in Auriga etc... I was fighting the dew on my eyepieces and the Pronto was dripping wet, through the night. This is an excellent scope and performed well, I had lot of good comment from others too. One girl who owned an ETX 90 before, said "She never seen anything this sharp and detailed in her Meade ETX , like in the Pronto." Show didn't start till 1:30am or so, when large bright meteors were striking through the sky, living gas trails, short and long like jet planes do.
Some trails even stayed around for a few minutes, keeping us occupied, when will it fade away.
Every other minute a really bright one came, followed by 2-3 small meteors. Some even breaking apart and able to distinguish 2 or 3 parallel trails, close to each other.
Excellent show, the crowd was cheering, ouh-ing and auh-ing, since by
I stayed till 4:00 am than headed home, but there were still some light show left, I even noticed it from my car driving home.