July 18, 2009: Lake Sonoma

Matthew Marcus

The CSCs were predicting clouds for the South Bay and clear for Lake Sonoma, which is my default site anyway, so that's where I went. The weather was shirtsleeve warm until pretty late, when a light jacket proved useful. The wind was intermittent but never really bad. A crowd of about 10 gathered, with scopes of sizes from 4" to 12.5". A couple of the scopes had laser-pointer finders, prompting a cry of "Don't cross the beams!". Several of us hadn't been out for periods ranging from 2 months (me) to a year or more, so eye candy was the theme, and there was plenty of it, being Milky Way season, with CVn still available early on. I caught a few of the PNs that Cygnus is stuffed full of, including the Egg Nebula, looked at the few objects available in Equuelus (how's that for an obscure constellation?) and worked a bit in Aquarius and Capricornus. The spikes sticking out of it were easily seen at 125x. Seeing wasn't great, so nothing spectacular was seen on Jupiter, even when it hit meridian. I wasn't really intending to do serious logging, but I got a few objects. Everybody but me left by 2; I left at 4 after looking at Venus and the Moon. After not having been out in months, it felt good to be under the stars again.