Hi Rich,
I was up at the Fremont Peak State Park the FPOA area along with five
other scopes on the observing pads entertaining 20+ summer astronomy class
students from Hartnell College and a large visitor crowd. The transparency
and seeing was good enough for us to show everyone fine views of summertime
celestial eye candy. I was using my 10˛ Mak-Cass telescope. We got last
glimpses of Saturn and Mars before they drift behind the Sun in a couple of
months. After twilight fell in the west, there was a striking 3-day old
crescent Moon with earthshine, bluish Regulus, orange Mars and yellow Saturn
all in a closely oriented line in Leo the Lionšs shoulder. What a sight!
Later on at 11pm Jupiter was high enough in the east to show Io in a fine
shadow transit across, and right over, Jupiteršs brown N. Equatorial Belt
between 11pm and 1am. Because of the contrast between bright Io and the
darker brown belt it was trailing over, Io and its black shadow were easily
observed throughout its entire transit over Jupiter. I bino-viewed the
event at 450x and it looked fantastic. The seeing improved greatly after
midnight so that I could see even more fine Jovian surface detail. I tired
out and curled up into my sleeping bag by 3 am. It was a very good observing
night up at FPOA with a good summertime crowd. The threatening Basin Fire
smoke from Big Sur was kept well south of Fremont Peak by the mild
prevailing westerly wind. There was a warm temperature inversion which kept
the the Peakšs temps. at 65-70°F all night. Woopie Summer is here!
Peter Natscher
Monterey
From: Rich N <rnapo@No-Spam>
Reply-To: The Astronomy Connection <sf-bay-tac@No-Spam>
Date: Sun, 6 Jul 2008 13:42:35 -0700
To: The Astronomy Connection <sf-bay-tac@No-Spam>
Subject: [TAC] Brief OR - Foothills Park, Sat July 5th '08
The PAS had another fine Foothills Park star party. Lots of visitors and
maybe 15 telescopes.
The seeing from sunset until I left around 12:30 am was not very good. Not
a good planetary night. It can be very good there but last night was not
one
of those nights.
We had fun showing the usual deep sky eye candy. I was using my AP155EDFS
refractor. The last object I was showing was M51.
It was fun night.
Rich
-- TAC mailing list - join or leave here: http://seds.org/mailman/listinfo/sf-bay-tac -- TAC mailing list - join or leave here: http://seds.org/mailman/listinfo/sf-bay-tacReceived on Sun Jul 6 14:13:22 2008
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