Last night's star party turned out to be rather good. Considering the weather conditions we had on Friday and earlier in the week, I was not expecting much. As I left Lincoln there was a good size cloud bank to the south and I considered turning around. But it looked like broken clouds so I kept going - and I'm glad that I did! When I arrived at Olive Creek Jim Kvasnicka, Bob Kacvinsky, and Dan Delzell were already set up. The clouds seemed to be breaking up and the wind had completely died down. Hey, this could be good! So I set up my LX50 on the concrete pad next to the other scopes.

It was one of those nights when passing cloud bands dictated what you could look at. But it was not like looking through sucker holes. Large areas of the sky were open for extended periods of time, and in those areas the seeing was quite good. Saturn provided crisp sharp views in all of our scopes. Cloud bands on the surface of Saturn and Cassini's Division in the rings were easy to see.

Dan brought his new 12" Meade Lightbridge, a really nice truss tube dob. He started off by showing us M81 and M82, and I saw the kind of details I wish I could see in my 8" SCT (sigh).

Throughout the evening we concentrated mostly on the Messiers, including M3, M35, M41, M42, M43, M46, M47, M51, M53, M68, M81, M82, and M104 among others. We also viewed the Double Cluster (NGC 869, 884), Stick Man (NCG 457), and several other open clusters. Bob Kacvinsky pointed his scope at some of the Virgo galaxies. The dew began to get heavy around 11:00 pm and we packed it in for the night. I was surprised at how many objects we were able to see on a night that started out looking very marginal.

Clear Skies,
Bob