Fremont Peak on St Patty's day/night

by Mark Johnston

Between us we celebrated St Patty's by putting away a pony keg and 3 bottles of Irish whiskey .... NOT.

Took a hike to the peak before sunset. Got great pictures of microwave tower, low fog in south valley, great sunset shot from midway up the peak and a few other 'art' shots of things on the south side of the peak.

As darkness set in, Tacos treated a few campers to eye candy as the twilight passed. One little guy was so small at my scope we took 3 or more minutes just getting him to see Saturn as I am sure his eye was off center.

Great skies with my 11" easily pulling in mag 13.5 type clusters and darkness at by 1am we had 21.36 mag/arcSecSq which is almost Willow springs darkness. Very light wind with temps no lower than 8 deg C by 1am (46 deg F) from what I measured.

Worked 5 Leo objects near triplet and then worked most all Coma Berenices H400 objects drifting toward upper virgo to finish with about 6 of those.

Pulled in 35 H400 objects and found a few things to add to my favorites that I report below:

- 4565 which is an amazing edge-on with a dust lane measuring mag 10.3 and 15.5' x 1.9' this was perhaps the nicest find of the night for me.

- Leo triplet (deep sky eye candy but always nice).

- 4147 glob which I guess I like because ... it is not just another open cluster (-;

- 4631 (Whale) and 4656 which are at a nice angle to each other.

- Area near 4459 in markarian chain which I was able to see 4468 (mag 13.7), 4474, and even detected from time to time two little guys (4446 and 4447) but wrote them off till checking detail on PC and found there were two tight gals right there after all. Then take a trip to 4477/4473 and finish moving towards 4435/4438 (cats eyes). All in all a nice section of the chain.

Clear skies,
mark