Grant Ranch

by Matthew Buynoski

Grant Ranch, which is a fair amount like Coe but with a creek for ground fog :-), wasn't that humid until later. It started out clear just before sunset, then got cloudy almost to the point of desperation (some gave up), then cleared a little, then almost did us in again, then cleared out very well, and finally started clouding again (at which point I left). We did have some dew, but not until after 10PM. It was chilly...many discovered that observing in December was not light jacket weather, esp. members of the public that showed up en masse.

While I'm at it, here's a bit about what happened up there on Sat. Public turnout was high; we had 3 boy scout troops, a local high school astronomy class, and a couple of people from a West Valley College astronomy class as well, plus 4-5 people out hiking or in the campground. The latter had to observe 5 different kinds of objects and report on them (single stars were not allowed as a member of the list, but for some reason doubles were). We didn't have all that many scopes, about 7 total: one ETX, one 8" equatorial, one 14" SCT, couple of 8" SCT's and a 10" or 12" (it was dark and I didn't ask...) dob, and a pair of 20X80's. I may have missed one or two as we were sort of split into 2 "clusters" of scopes about 30 yards apart for some reason.

Anyway, since we had fairly limited sky most of the evening due to clouds to NW, W, and SW (often reaching in and snitching most of the zenith and NE as well) most of what we looked at was in the Cassiopeia to Orion area: lots of open clusters along the Milky Way from Cass. down through Auriga, Orion nebula, Saturn, gamma Andromedae, some spectra (Capella, Rigel, Betelgeuse,and...early on before the clouds...Vega), etc. Seeing wasn't bad on the moon early on before being fuzzed by cloudiness; good views of craters along the terminator. Then it got worse; Saturn "topped out" about 200X; we could see Cassini's division a fair % of the time, an equatorial cloud band, and what may have been the planet's shadow on the rings.

The astronomy students and scouts all got a fairly decent exposition for the condidtions, and all of us astronomers got needed photon fixes.