The Bay Area's Coe Fog

by Dan Wright

There was a nice potluck BBQ at Coe on Saturday. Fancy grilled sausages served with fresh buns, hot slices of Mike's Pizza, spicy Pad Thai, potato salad and coleslaw, an assortment of side dishes and chips, extra large chocolate chip cookies, muffins, etc. Wags told a funny story about 151 rum and pulling sinks off walls and toppling backwards into bathtubs. You should hear him tell the full version sometime.

The setting sun was distant and red, "like a free H-alpha show", said Bracewell. A band of clouds stretched across the west resembling the dust lane in M104. We were worried the clouds would come get us.

We had about 2.5 hours of observing, with horizons obscured by fog but the milky way overhead workable. Conditions were dewy and many complained about fogged telrads.

At 10 PM we really started to lose it. Fog welled up on both sides and then closed overhead. We knew it was all over. We had a Pink Floyd light show with 5 GLP's tracing shapes together in the fog-dome, then Rich N. aimed his bright white flashlight backwards through Grimly Fiendish's XT dob and created an amazing beam like a searchlight. I got a picture of it.

Everyone switched on white lights and broke down in a hurry before the fog got any worse, and the parking lot was empty by 10:30. Grimly Fiendish and I were the last ones out, and we went back and found kind of a mess on the picnic table and cleaned it up.

I took a few snapshots:

http://www.fototime.com/inv/B093272C998698E

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