by George Feliz
The night also began with mucho extraneous white lights as the rangers and police dealt with break-ins to 3 cars belonging to mountain bikers. It appears there has been a nasty rash of thefts at MB in the past few weeks from unattended vehicles. Please take care.
Once the gendarmes had departed, we were left with Dennis (8" Schmidt-Newt), Jeff C (4" Tak on G11 doing some CCD imaging of the Swan), Mike (8" SCT), Mark (4" Stellarvue SV4 on a nice Teegul mount), Gary (TV85), Frank (a knowledgeable visitor from Berlin with a newly purchased ED80) and yours truly with a homemade, Highe-design 6", f/6 dob.
Seeing was decent with an early, easy, clean split of the Double-Double at 100x. Around midnight I tried 200-300x with moderate image breakdown. The Milky Way was present, but suffered from our local light pollution.
There was quite a bit of socializing and sharing of views which contributed greatly to the enjoyment of the night. My contribution to distracting the others from their observing projects was a few suggestions of multiple objects accessible in the same field with a small scope:
M13 + NGC 6207 (an unloved galaxy ~ 0.5degree from the eye candy)
M24 + NGC 6603 ("imbedded" OC) + B92 (not quite so dark at MB)
M22 + NGC 6642 (an underachieving GC)
M28 + NGC 6638 (another more modest GC, but not as big a contrast as with M22)
Mark also showed both sections of the Veil in a 35 Panoptic with his refractor - always a treat.
My own modest observing project included about a dozen objects from Steve G.'s DeepMap600 in the Sag/Sco/Oph/Lib region. Included were 5897, 6281, 6322, Tr29, 6124, 6153, 6302, 6563, 6629, 6645 (my favorite of the night - a fine, rich OC), 6716, 6755, 6664.
I packed up around 12:15 and had an easy ride home.
What "makes" these sessions enjoyable is the complete break from the daily routine, and the generosity and companionship of fellow observers. Thanks to the other attendees.
Posted on sf-bay-tac Aug 18, 2004 17:25:54 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Jan 08, 2005 20:44:18 PT