by Matthew Marcus
From the ORs I've seen out of Coe, I gather that we Northerners made somewhat of a wrong choice. I had an intuition that this might be so, but the Clear Sky Clocks promised better conditions up north. Here's what we got: Lots of high clouds around sunset, thinning out enough to permit views of the bright stuff, including Jupiter and Saturn. The seeing was very mushy. I did manage to catch Io going behind the planet, and a barge in moments of OK seeing. Cassini was an in-and-out thing. I didn't even try for the Trapezium or any difficult doubles.
Later, things got a bit better. It was still not very transparent, but it was good enough to work with. The UC Berkeley group was there, and their bad luck held in that the night was nowhere near as good as what Lake Sonoma has delivered in the past.
Still, we managed to observe quite a few of the brighter objects. The supernova in 3190 was still visible in Robert's 17.5". For me, the highlight of the evening was galaxy-hopping the whole of Markarian's Chain at 125x using the chart on p. 2-436 (I think) of NSOG. I saw almost every one of the galaxies along that path. I figure that the faintest extended object I could see, and that with difficulty, was about mag 11.8 or so. I logged a few Leo galaxies I hadn't gotten before. Another highlight was 6210, a medium-size PN in Hercules. In Robert's scope, it was bright LED green with no filter. The color showed up in my scope as well at lower power, and in his up to 300x. The central star was quite obvious. Of course, I did lots of eye-candy observing, such as M13, M92, 4631, M64, etc. I'd forgotten what wonderful galaxies Coma contains. Since the clearest area of sky was around UMa, I grabbed some of the big objects there, such as M81/M82 and M97.
Around 2AM I noticed that Cassiopia had swung around and become visible in the NE, so I looked for and found Comet I-Z. It's still a treat in binox. For a brief window, the comet has the rare attribute of being both a morning and an evening object. The tail was pointing up, so the constellation plus comet looked like 'W!'. The tail was distinctly bluish in binox. The comet shows to much better advantage in its present morning position because the sky is still dark. Unfortunately, I'd already packed up the Ranger due to wind (I didn't want another blowdown) and a tree was between the comet and my C8, so I was limited to eye (yes, it's visible) and binox.
Late, after everyone else had left, I played around a bit in upper Centaurus, thought about waiting for Scorpius to get higher so I could polish off the last few in my Deepmap list, but decided it wasn't that good. I started packing up at ~2:30. Although it wasn't the best of nights, even a crappy night of observing is better than a good night of TV, movies or work, so I went home happy.