Great night on Fremont Peak

by Rob Hawley


Last night was an awesome night on the Peak. The fog rolled in and almost completely covered Hollister. I don't recall when I have ever seen it that dark.

To my surprise I was the only individual astronomer in the FPOA area. I hope the folks in SW had as good a night.

As last week I used my scope to handle the overflow from the 30". During the night I had maybe 15-20 folks looking through the scope. I mainly showed the common star party stuff; M31, M17, M31, M22, M27, M11, and Uranus.

About 11PM the visitors left and I got around to my own observing program. I was mainly spending the evening on the Herschel 2 list. With the skies as dark as they were the items on the list were not much of a challenge. One of the most interesting objects was NGC 6894. This is a planetary and I was expecting the familiar puff of light. It looked like it had some structure in my normal 136x eyepiece. I cranked the power up to 318x and thought I saw I ring. I went up to the 30" and confirmed that it was a subtle ring.

Since I was using my ServoCat most of the evening I decided to get some practice with manual pointing. So for about a half hour I did a mini Messier Marathon pointing the scope at all of the Messier objects that were convenient.

Once again we had a great view of Mars. The best views were after 2 AM. I could make out some definite dark areas using a red filter.

Next week FPOA is having a BBQ and they are going galaxy hunting after the moon sets.


Posted on sf-bay-tac Sep 04, 2005 10:20:31 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Mar 09, 2006 22:07:23 PT