by Bob Czerwinski
I needed a night out under the stars. I packed up latish and headed for Henry Coe.
I'm glad Bill posted his report. Last night I ended up observing from a location on the east side of Morgan Hill, and wondered how things were waaay up the road there at Coe. Breezy is what I suspected. Initially I experienced a somewhat steady but very light breeze at my observing location (the courtyard/driveway of a private residence), but the breeze pretty much dropped to nothing by about 1:00am. I kept observing until 3:00am, knowing I'd certainly pay for it at the office today. 8^(
I was only working CV, chasing H2500 galaxies, so I'm not certain how the rest of the sky was doing. I'll admit that from about 9:15-10:00pm I did play show n' tell for my hosts, mainly showing off the thin crescent Moon and the planets. Jupiter was initially doing the backstroke, but was definitely looking better as time went on. Although the initial seeing was pretty soft, it was still far from the worst I've ever experienced. After about 11:00pm, the seeing steadily improved through the rest of the session. A couple of items I couldn't locate around 10:30~11:00pm were visible around 1:00~1:30am. Transparency was about average, nothing to write home about, but I know I was definitely limited in this respect. About 10:30pm I estimated the zenith LM to be about 5.9, and although I never bothered to formally recheck this later, I don't believe it improved. More than half of the items I was chasing last night remained invisible, even though my eyepiece field matched that of TheSky. Frustrating ... but fun at the same time.
Still, you've got to catch those photons when you can. And as we all know, sleep is overrated. ;^)
Posted on sf-bay-tac Apr 23, 2004 16:10:28 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.1 Jul 10, 2004 19:21:56 PT