by Dennis Beckley
As Steve Gottlieb mentioned, it was one of the warmest nights I've ever experienced in several years of observing up there - shorts and t-shirts the whole night. We had sixteen scopes including several beautiful Starmasters of various sizes and one very large Schmidt-Cas. I wish I'd have brought my camera - it looked like a mini - Oregon Star Party!
Since it was a short night I brought my smaller back-up scope (an Orion XT 10) and spent the night looking at Comet Hoenig, various galaxies in Pegasus listed in Tom Lorenzin's 1000+ Database (Including NGC1(!), 7479 (nice bar), 7814 (nice dust lane), 7331 (no companions seen, just barely detected Stephan's Quintet in the 10 inch); difficult globular 6749 (with the help of Randy Muller's SM 18) and some HII regions in Barnard's Galaxy (thanks to Steve Gottlieb).
It was really a great night with a fun group of observers.
I had a chance to talk to Steve Gottlieb about the excellent quality of his written observations and he gave me some tips on how to make mine better. I mentioned that I thought he ought to consider publishing his many written observations so that the entire astronomy community could benefit from his excellent reports and not just members of TAC or TAC-SAC. I know I always find them useful and routinely save all his E-mails for future reference. He mentioned that this would be a major project and he wasn't sure about his time commitments and also how much of a demand there might be for this project. I'd be interested in hearing from others on the list regarding whether they might find a published version of his observations useful and just to give Steve some feedback.