Matthew Marcus wrote:
> I was alone under partly cloudy skies until around sundown,
> at which point Bob Czerwinski and one of the Daves (sorry! I
> forget which) turned up).
Yep, it was certainly a short night at Henry Coe. David Kingsley was
the "David" of choice for the evening. <grin>
Skies were probably 60~70% clear when I arrived, but this was soon to
change. A strange phenom: the high clouds which headed our way were
generally moving from NW to SE, but the low-level winds at Coe were
moving from east to west. Go figure. Even so, the seeing was quite
good. The gentle gusts commonly associated with sunset at Henry Coe
didn't drop off as one would expect, but increased over the next hour,
blowing my 18" Starmaster all over the place. (The vision of Mark
Wagner's 18" Obsession lifting out of its rocker box definitely flashed
through my mind!) As described by Matthew, when I was looking at the
Orion 1973-1975-1977 complex through his C8, the foreground stars made
for some nice Lissajous Patterns!
If you haven't seen the Saturn-M1 paring yet, I hope tonight's sky
conditions will allow you to do so. David Kingsley was certainly
correct when he said the best viewing of the pair would probably be over
the next couple of nights, prior to Saturday's Main Event. Quite a
striking pair using a 17mm Nagler in my 'scope last night, with the
objects separated by just over 13-arcmins. Tonight they'll only be
separated by 8~9-arcmins.
With my eyes watering much worse than normal, I made an early departure
last night, hoping the sacrifice would appease the weather deities and
provide Matthew and David with a few hours of decent observing time.
Looks like this wasn't to be the case. Still, some observing is better
than no observing!
...Bob...
Bob Czerwinski