Houge and Coyote

by Phil Chambers

Houge on Fri night was not very well attended by "viewers" but there was a nice collection of scopes. That is probably good since the seeing was about as poor as I have seen in a few years. m13 looked like a 15th mag galaxy (Mark W's comment)

Rich N said the Jet Stream map showed it to be overhead and I am a believer. I think it was centered on Houge.

However, the next night at Coyote was different. The seeing was pretty good and we had lots of spectators. Another nice collection of scopes. This was one of the public star parties at Coyote and worked quite well. A few folks participated in the Bar Be Que but it didnt look like very many.

I think the rangers were happy. We had lots of folks from the campground and cars were driving in and parking. I didnt get away from "jupiter cam" to walk around much and also didnt take a scope count but maybe someone else did. My guess would be about 20 scopes.

The downside for me came when I removed the cam to do some personal observing and found that the scope was completely dewed up. Then I noticed that all the papers and equipment was wet. It totally sneaked up on me. I left soon after that. I dried out the corrector with my hair dryer and looked for comet 9temple1, then put everything away.

Couldnt find the comet again even though I have (what I think) is a good ephemeris now. I was polar aligned and should have been looking right at it. Using the 11.

Did anyone see it, what size scope, and how did it look???

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Posted on sf-bay-tac Jun 12, 2005 11:07:05 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Sep 25, 2005 08:27:13 PT