Crestview Park Tue 05/11/2004

by Peter McKone

Noticing that the wind had stopped blowing yesterday evening, Bob Baldwin and I took binoculars and his 80mm refractor to Crestview Park in San Carlos to watch the Comet. The drive took only 5 minutes. It's not what you would call a dark site, but nearby light sources are blocked, and there are virtually no light sources in the South or West. Horizons in those directions may be even better than Montebello.

Seeing was good. We got a clean split of Castor and Jupiter's bands looked sharp. As always, the Beehive was very pretty.

The comet was already easy to find in binoculars when we arrived at 8:30, and it was naked-eye shortly afterwards. In the 80mm refractor I saw a core with nebulosity elongated towards the left (ie. Southeast). In 9x63 binoculars I saw a much longer tail - maybe one degree. It wasn't like in photographs, but still very nice. Aperture + low power seems to be the key.

A couple nearby residents dropped in and got nice views of Jupiter and Saturn and Venus. I swear that one of them asked if she was looking at the Moon. I heard the same question asked at Montebello recently, but at least on that night the Moon was visible in the sky. Afterwards our guest said she thought Saturn was the best. It's hard to argue with that!

Posted on sf-bay-tac May 12, 2004 12:08:27 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.1 Jul 11, 2004 16:37:22 PT