by Jeffrey Crilly
Did anyone go out observing last night (Friday)? How was it?
It started out with lots of smoke just east of palo alto... when I went up the hill to montebello, I was surprised to see smoke up there also... however the smoke was really thick in the valley -- the east bay hills were barely visible.
As expected, by nightfall stars were barely visible at montebello. Mars was ok though.
As the night went on, the marine layer obviously came in and it got pretty dark up there. Also, it appeared that smoke had subsided as the milky way was coming through with its usual montebello "good night" stature.
By the time "last call" (closing time) came around it was getting to be a fantastic night. It started out with pretty high suck factor and ended with very low suck factor.
There was a bit of traffic in and out (maybe a total of five cars) during the night, and a few tourists (and maybe a couple folks that posted earlier on the list).
In addition to mars we managed deepsky views here and there -- mostly the bright stuff M17, M13, M31, etc... I ended the night with a nice low power view (25x) of the veil waterfall in the 4" refractor.