Coe Sat 10 May 2008

Matthew Marcus

Even though conditions were not promising, I decided to get out and observe anyway. I picked Coe because the CSCs predicted better transparency than Lake Sonoma, and I figured the extra altitude would help with the sky-crud.

When I got to the parking lot a little before sundown, I found it full of cars, but no scopes were out. Turned out that the cars belonged to members of a Sierra Club hike. They started at 9:30AM, hiked for 17miles, and only just got back at 7:30PM. Coe has some horrendously steep trails, so I imagine that the pace was a bit slow at times. A couple of them were impressed by my C8 - shows how little they know! They did warn me that dust would be kicked up when they left, so I kept it covered till they were gone. No one else turned up to join me - I guess they all knew better.

Once they were gone, I looked at the obvious targets - Moon, Mars, Mercury and Saturn. The seeing was OK but not great, so I was able to hold 250x on Saturn but 400x was NG, especially with the infamous Coe Winds. Saturn showed the Cassini division, a couple of moons, the two most prominent bands and the shadow of the planet on the rings. I've always heard that the rings display a slight color difference between E and W sides. I sorta think I saw that, with the W side lighter. Can anyone confirm or refute?

The transparency, not to put too fine a point on it, sucked. Between that and the moon, it was like a full-moon night or a night at someplace completely urban. I could barely see some of the galaxies in Downtown Virgo, and M51 was a pair of indistinct smudges. M3, M13, M92 and M5 were washed out but viewable. I figured that the Eskimo Nebula would be, even with filters, too diluted by the nearby Moon, so I didn't try it. I did do some double stars. I didn't wait up for M57, the Double-Double or Jupiter. Instead, I left at 10PM.

There seemed to be an inordinate amount of cop activity on 880, with somebody pulled over every 10 miles or so. I wonder if it's quota time.

mam