Phil's report

As Blake mentioned earlier, Wednesday night was an excellent observing night. In the early twilight, we were looking at Saturn and 5 of its moons at crazy-high powers. I went as high as 263x on the 15" Dob while Blake was well over 300x on the C14 with very little image breakdown. My main targets for the night were many of the globular clusters in Ophiuchus and I knocked off about 17 of them ranging from the big and bright like M10/M12 to magnitude 9.7 NGC6342. There are still a few more in Oph, some of them beyond 10th magnitude that I hope to have a chance to chase before the weekend is over. I observed comet McNaught C/2009 K5 fairly low in the northern sky; now almost 12th magnitude. This is the same comet I looked at through Katrina's 10" Dob last weekend where it looked much brighter and better that it did last night through my scope.

Lora joined us on the observing pad around midnight, interested to see what was up there. I showed her a few of the globular clusters in Oph which didn't impress her at all (too faint, too fuzzy). So I changed tactics and dove into some showpiece nebulae like M57, M27, M17 which she thought were pretty cool. We then looked at M11 which is a beautiful open cluster, M51, M81 and M82 galaxies, and then Blake suggested some double stars. Starting with Mizar/Alcor, we moved on to Gamma Del, Epsilon Lyr, and Albireo (of course). Lora really enjoyed the double-star tour as well as all the factoids from Blake.

Blake showed me Herschel's Garnet star (mu Cephei) through the C14, a red supergiant in Cepheus - something I had not observed before so that was a real treat. I then tracked it down in my own scope and spent a bit of time on it (learn something every day!).

I closed out the evening with the Saturn Nebula, Neptune and Jupiter (still too low to afford a good view). It was a fantastic evening of observing, but as Blake mentioned, the bugs are horrendous. The early evening started off with blackflies, it then moved on to horse/deer flies (not too many of those) but once it got dark, the mosquitoes were relentless. Coupled with very warm temperatures, it made for a rather uncomfortable observing experience. Thank goodness we had great skies to off-set the bug factor.