by Marek Cichanski
The drive up the hill was the usual - waves of fog could be seen spilling over the hills, and it seemed like we were hosed. We got to the MB lot around 19:30, and went through our usual ritual of eating dinner, shooting the breeze, and looking north from Los Trancos at the fog coming over the ridgeline. Some while after sunset, though, we decided that it was worth setting up. Fog was coming through the notch to the south, but it kept coming and going. Worth a shot.
In the end, it stayed clear the whole time. Seeing was initially very soft, but got pretty good by the end of the night. Transparency was a little above average, I'd say, and after about midnight the light dome in the east was noticeably diminished. There wasn't really fog over Silicon Valley, but there was a lot of haze and muck, and I think that kept down the light dome.
I did some 'mopping up operations' on H400 objects in various parts of the sky, from Ursa Minor to Sagittarius. I'm not sure how many objects I'm down to, but I must be getting close. Need to transcribe some tapes. I also looked at a fair amount of eye candy in the summer Milky Way. Ended the night with a nice view of the Veil Nebula in the 31 Nag with an OIII filter. Life is good.
James bagged a lot of objects, too. He spent some quality time with NSOG, reading up on objects and then bagging them with his Vixen refractor. It looked very enjoyable. He found some cool stuff, too. I'm amazed at how deep that 4.5" refractor can go. We saw some pretty faint globs.
A couple of other observers stopped by, and as usual I've shamefully forgotten their names. They had an Orion maksutov (90mm, maybe?), which gave remarkably nice views of M13 and M51.
There was some chilly breeze between about 11:30 and 1am, but overall it was warm and still. The fog came through the south notch periodically, but never got close to us. No dew.
So, it was another of those nights that makes the drive up the hill worthwhile. This is both good and bad, because it makes it almost impossible to turn around when there's fog coming over parts of the ridgeline - you never know how it's gonna work out!
Posted on sf-bay-tac Jul 13, 2004 10:44:03 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Jan 03, 2005 19:22:27 PT