Cronan Ranch

Bill Porte

I arrived at Cronan Ranch around 5:30 under partly cloudy skies. Marsha showed up shortly thereafter. We set up our scopes in hopes that the skies would clear up and give us at least a few hours of decent observing conditions. Unfortunately, the clouds persisted, and we had to observe through clearings in the cloud layers. A diffuse layer of high clouds and moderate humidity reduced transparency overall, so we had to limit our viewing to a few brighter objects including the Orion Nebula and the Auriga clusters. Our best views of the evening were of Mars, which revealed a surprising amount of surface detail. We ended up having a very enjoyable few hours of good conversation and comradery which more than made up for the disappointing sky conditions. We packed up our gear and headed home around 8:30.

CS, Bill