Wednesday OR

by Marek Cichanski

Wednesday turned out to be surprisingly worthwhile up at Montebello. There were three of us there - myself, Kevin Roberts, and a fellow who's name I can't quite recall. (And I even asked him to repeat it as he was leaving! Man, I'm spacey...Ground control to major tom...)

Although there was a lot of cirrus hanging around at sunset, there were significant intervals with little cloudiness. Much of the 7 and 8 o'clock hours had a nice clear western sky.

I mostly looked at eye candy, mostly Messiers, and a few NGC open clusters. I stared at M42 a lot when it finally cleared the light dome.

Saturn was great last night. I'm not a great judge of seeing, but there were some wonderful moments of steady seeing, when I could see more detail on Saturn than I'd ever seen before. I couldn't help wondering if some of our apochromat folks were looking at it from home. If so, I hope they were getting the kind of seeing that we were getting at MB.

Jupiter was decent, but not quite as good as Saturn - there seemed to be a fairly sharp demarcation between the seeing at, say, 20 degrees altitude, and, say, 45 degrees altitude - more than I'd usually expect.

I left at midnight, and the general clouding-over hadn't even started by then.

Overall, a pretty decent night.