I couldn't make it to 5-mile this past weekend so I headed out to the Antennas site. There were 6 scopes set up: me, Dan Gruber, Peter Argenziano, Charles Whiting, and two other individuals, Darrell (?) and Derek (?). Charles get the "Magellan Award" for arriving in the dark. In the daylight earlier I had driven right past the site and had to backtrack.
It was a great, star-studded sky night. The darkness precluded me from seeing the scope's eyepiece so it was touch and feel to change oculars. Save for one very large and long band of brightness that extended from Sagittarius to Cassiopeia, the sky was cloudless. Transparency was great but the seeing was judged as average. Temperature wise, it was a short sleeve night until about 1:30 AM - then requiring only a light cover-up. At darkness there was no wind, and around 2:00 AM, a 2-3 MPH alternating warm and cool breeze blew through for a bit.
My goal was to capture H400 objects in Ursa Major and I succeeded. When I started, UMA was relatively high in the sky and I needed every advantage to see some of them. I knew objects such as NGC 4085, at 12.8 magnitude and 2.7' x 0.8' in size, would challenge my 9.25" aperture and my thinking was validated. UMA has a LOT of small, dim galaxies and I felt I could have benefited from the use of a rubber stamp to describe most of the objects that I logged. By the time I had worked my way through the list, UMA was low and I could not detect the final three galaxies. Next time. I then added a few entries from Draco and Cannes Venatici and hit the sack at 3AM.
It was a fun night and I declared success: 40 H400 object logged.Bob
