March 17th 2007, 10:00pm in backyard in Lubbock

<p>I setup early with the plan to start observing around 11:00pm. I used Venus to setup my finderscope, it was a waning gibbous venus :-). The reason I decided to start late, was the hope that many of my neighbors would have turned in for the evening turning off their lights. That part worked out but seeing was not as good as the Lubbock Clear Sky Clock predicted. Saturn was not as clear in the 14mm UWA on the C8 compared to few days ago. I was hoping M66, M65 and NGC3628 would be reasonable targets. I could make them all out but the details were not any better than in the past. It was kind of fun though to sit outside with a blanket and my lafuma and just watch UMa move slowly around the pole star, I was listening to jodcast for february on my IPod at the same time. I could make out UMa 29 and 23 quite easily, I would say I could see down to 4.5 mag at the zenith. I checked out M51 as well, could make out the centers as fuzzy patches, at 12:45am I tried M13, no problem. I them tried Menkent, it was above the horizon but behind a tree, Omega Centauri, NGC5139 was behind a house, I'll try from a better location sometime in the future. I stopped at 12:50am.