Observing report Lake Sonoma 3-Aug-02:
by Jason Hatton
It was good meeting everyone who was at Lake Sonoma on Saturday evening, it was a shame that the weather wasn't better. However, the three of us (Myself, Doug and Slavas) that decided to stay were rewarded with a fairly clear sky and good seeing for a short while until the clouds rolled back in.
I decided to rig up my Orion 5" maksutov and look at Venus which was setting in the west, which showed a little over half phase. As the sky darkened, the clouds / fog started to clear, although they were never far away - it looked like a layer of fog was lurking literally at the end of the road! The milky way was visible in reasonable detail and we looked at M22, M8, M20, M17 and M16 through the maksutov. At lowest power M17 (swan nebula) did really look like a swan floating in the blackness of space peppered with myriad stars. Slavas had his binoculars on a tripod, which we used to scan the milky way.
The seeing was fairly good so we looked at some doubles, starting with Alcor and Mizar. Epsilon Lyra (the double double) was cleanly split at x154 using the Mak and one component was even split at x61. Eta Cassiopia was a relatively wide double, but with nice contrast with a yellow primary and purple / dull red secondary. We finished up with a look at M13 and a short view of M57 just as the clouds rolled back in around 10:30pm.