Lick, Friday 6/27/2008: A Useable Sky

Marek Cichanski

Here's a brief report - really more of a quick 'conditions report' - from Lick last night. I wrote this as an email to Jeff Crilly and Rich Neuschaefer, who I think are heading up there tonight, and I thought add a few more comments and post it to TAC in case anyone's interested:

Hi Guys,

Last night turned out alright at Lick. We couldn't really see much of the Bay Area from up there, pretty hazy from the smoke, but the sky was actually fairly useable. The researchers were using their scopes, and the public program went ahead as planned. There was some fairly serious extinction up to 20 or 30 degrees or so, but up high the sky was actually alright. Before sunset, I'd been pleasantly surprised at the amount of blue overhead. I looked at stuff up high - M13, M57, stuff like that - and it looked pretty normal in the eyepiece. Even looked at M51 in my 18", could see a bit of the disk of M51 in addition to the nucleus, and saw the nucleus of the other gx, but no 'bridge' or anything. Pretty nice views, sky background looked about like usual, as near as I could tell. Once the Milky Way rose above the extinction zone, we actually had some naked-eye Milky Way. We could see it from about the Large Sagittarius Starcloud through Cygnus. Not the greatest MW I've ever seen, but it was nice to see it at all.

I didn't smell any smoke until I left at 1 am, then I noticed a bit of smoky smell as I started downhill.

Public was nice, seemed like I had longer lines than usual at my scope. For the bonus object, Ellie put the 36" on Jupiter. The seeing was actually quite good. (The 36" is neat, but an apo it ain't!) We had to climb up on the Percival-Lowell-style ladder in order to get up to the eyepiece, even with the floor all the way up.

Pretty warm and comfortable all night long, basically a decent, uneventful Lick night. Glad to have a bit of sky.

Marek