Sat 5 July 2008 Lake Sonoma

Matthew Marcus

It's been a while since I was up at Lake Sonoma. Good to get back!

Possibly due to GSSP, there were only two other people there, Kent and Dana, and Kent left early.

The sky started out pretty unpromising, with clouds, bright haze to the S and poor seeing. We started off with the Moon and Saturn before it got dark. Later, just as the CSC predicted, the seeing became reasonably good and the sky darkened to the point where M13 was naked-eye. Jupiter started out as a swimmy blob, but later sharpened to the point of revealing a couple of bands.

I did mostly eye-candy, reacquanting myself with the sky, followed by some challenge objects I'd done before, such as Stefan's Quintet. Dana was working mostly on his favorite topic, OC-looking asterisms otherwise unreported. He pointed me to some of them. One object he pointed me to was an actual OC discovered visually by a German amateur, in Cygnus, I think (I don't have my logsheets handy). This faint object was barely visible in my 8", but we confirmed using finder charts and checked each other's observation. I'd guess that it's no brighter than mag 12. I also found a little asterism near one of the globs in Delphinus (not 7006, the other one). At 36x it looks like a round PN or cluster. Mag up on it and it resolves into a ring of 6 stars with a couple of fainter stars nearby. We'll see if it's been reported by the Deep Sky Hunters.

While Dana and I were observing, we noticed Pegasus, Andromeda, the Pleiades, Capella, etc. coming up. It was getting late! What finally stopped us was the E getting bright. My last object was IC1548-50, an annular PN in Grus, which was just reaching the meridian. This is a mag 11.5 object way down at dec -39 or thereabouts, so it's tough! A nebula filter brought it out, though. I couldn't log it because I was out of logsheets, having not printed out new ones in a while, nor done the sort-merge operation of filing old sheets into the logbook since at least March.

The sun rose while I was still on 101, after having stopped at Pete's/HennyPenny for a stay-awake meal. The sun didn't stay long, as the marine layer made its presence known.

All in all, a very nice night after an unpromising start. Just goes to show that "you gotta be in it to win it".

mam