by Peter Natscher
You should'a joined up with all of us at Dino. We had the night of the Millenium! Mag 6.5 seeing in with clear winter pattern. The sky opened up at sunset. Not a cloud was to be seen. We had some breezes but all enjoyed the transparency last night. The humidity stayed at 85% most of the night until 12 am so we didn't have any dewing problems. My 20" Starmaster was gathering all of the photons from many galactic NGC's that it could get. I was able to see spiral arms in many NGC's allong with the "Antenna Galaxies" in Corvus like I've never seen them before. NGC 2683 in Lynx was simply stunning with its wide and large edge-on appearence. NGC 2903 in Leo showed a nice set of E-W curved spiral arms extending far from its nucleus. M108, an other edge-on galaxy in Ursa Major was so bright in my 19 mm Panoptic it looked like a neon sign. M 97, the "Owl Planetary" looked very bright to me also, showing its two dark eyes and its mag 16 central star. I made a total of eighteen 15-minute sketches of H400 galaxies for my H400 project binder. I'm up to No. 135 on the list after 3 months of observing and I'm on track to finish my H400 sketchbook by year's end. I'm using no GoTo but I'm still temmppted to use it for fun. My star hopping skills arfe very good. We'll try again for Dino next weekend.
As I drove home at 2 am Sunday morning, I past by Fremont Peak on Rt. 156 and it was totally fogged in. I felt sorry that anyone who went up there last night got no sky to see at all.