by Rob Hawley
There were high clouds while driving south, but these cleared by sunset. Haze hung in the north part of the valley, but the south and east looked pretty good. The winds were very light and not much of a factor. Surfaces did not start getting wet until about 9 PM. Seeing was decent.
I started with a quick look at Venus. Even with the moon filter it was really hard to see due to the brightness.
Saturn was next. I came back to it several times during the night. My views were just OK. My views of Saturn were better last week from home.
After it was fully dark I took a look at C/2002 T7 Linear. Sean already discussed this in his OR. Even in the 8 inch scope the comet was obvious and tail visible with averted vision.
Most of the evening was spent on Open Clusters. NGC 457, NGC 7789, M103, M 36, M37, and M44. The 7789 would be interesting to view in a darker site. It looks like there were a lot of stars that were just below the threshold of the scope. Sean looked at it in the 10 inch and you could definitely see more.
M31, M32, and M110 all stood out very well. I was able to see the outer structure of M31.
I spent a long time hopping to M81/M82. It was fairly low when I first started and I was not able to make out any good stars close to them. Thus I had to do a fairly long star hop.
M1 was one of the last objects I looked at. It stood out surprising well against the sky.
By about 10 PM the transparency was starting to go. We all packed up and were gone about 10:30.
Posted on sf-bay-tac Tue Jan 20 11:23:43 2004 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.0 Sun Jan 25 08:27:46 2004 PT