I was out at Vekol with 5 other people rather than what I imagine was a major star party at Arizona City for the Messier Marathon. Conditions were good, with good transparency, and decent but not great seeing. It was fairly warm and dew wasn't a problem even though the humidity was high for this location and time. There was more greenery than I've ever seen at Vekol Road. I'm not energetic enough for a marathon so I concentrated on only a few items with my 16" dob. I mostly observed objects from Tom Polakis' book from Cancer, Leo and Leo Minor. And I'm only reporting on one remarkable object. NGC 2903 is a large bright galaxy near the sickle of Leo. It was easy in my 11x80 finder. In my 16" dob it was an amazing object showing a great deal of detail. It is a large spiral tilted so it was very elongated, but not edge on. It showed knots in the spiral arms with the most prominant on the North-East side. This knot is cataloged as NGC 2905. The galaxy showed some spiral structure and dark patches and lanes. At times I got the impression of multiple wispy narrow arms as opposed to the general feeling of broader spiral structure. It took power well and I blew it up to about 225x with a 9mm Nagler. It showed more details with this than a lower power. It also looked good and showed detail in a 12.5 dob as well. This object is bright, large and well known but the large amount of detail in large scopes may not be as well known. I also observed it almost 10 years ago (4/1/1995) in a 10" dob. With that scope I didn't spot much detail from good skies in central Florida. Joe Larkin __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new resources site! http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/resources/ -- See message header for info on list archives or unsubscribing, and please send personal replies to the author, not the list.