Observed at Fremont peak Wed May 7, 2008 and the 'wishlist of
desparation' paid in full
Good old Fremont Peak changes with the breeze. Got there and visited
the SW lot to eat the Togo's sandwich and perhaps take a quick hike.
Took a nice video with handheld camera of light fog rolling over the
ridge 50 yards from the SW lot on both sides. I like the way it looks
but was a bit worried as to how it may impact observing. Started out on
my hike to the peak and as I hit the rocky corner on the right near the
back heard some rustling 100 feet away and thinking it was dear peered
off into the light fog and felt that the solitary deer I saw was fairly
stocky and low and had rather thick legs. I decided to retreat slowly
and made grunting and aggressive sounds as I slowly walked back to the
lot. Did not really want to try to see exactly what it was, not worth it.
Back at the pads fog obscured all but the peaks of the far off
south-east highest close peaks.
By 9pm clouds had dropped a few degrees and were at 0 or lower and later
dropped maybe a degree more.
I'll mention right off the bat that I was armed with Comet Boattini
charts and that one is very obvious in the eyepiece at this time and an
fairly easy find off of mU Hydra last night a few degrees below. I only
used the scope and my guess would be you may not be able to pick it out
with binoculars due to moon glow in the general area, maybe. There are
others but I found a nice chart at http://tomsastroblog.com/?p=1509
So the night was ok and the best part was to bag some extremely low
targets, lowest of which was NGC5286 confirmed by extremely near
forground bright star and a very near doublish star just north and a
very careful star hop which included at times using trees in the
viewfinder to move a few degrees as they were more plentiful than bright
enough stars. What a riot.
I will say that the observation was very poor at that but indeed present.
Other targets down south were finally NGC4945, a fairly elongated object
that was getting close to the lights so really had to coax it and wait
for it. This would be the 3rd attempt this month to catch that one so I
was very happy to finally get a definite 30% with averted type look.
Two objects that stand out in my mind were planitary IC4406 which is
greater than 2:1 EW elongated shape which was very unusual for a
planitary and a very nice glob later in NGC5986.
Many students were up there earlier and so I helped out a bit offering
views of things on their lists.
Very grateful to the gods of the Peak for that gift of the deep south
last night.
Mark
-- Party time! GSSP is over 250 attendees: http://www.goldenstatestarparty.blogspot.com Add to TAC's Flickr Group! http://www.flickr.com/groups/tac/ Mailing list preferences: http://seds.org/mailman/listinfo/sf-bay-tacReceived on Thu May 8 23:25:11 2008
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