Its been a tough summer for viewing, either cloudy on dark nights or clear on moon-lit nights. I also travelled a bit which caused me to miss some opportunities. I finally got out briefly yesterday night just to check out the work I did in the backyard, following the advise of Roland and Linda Beard in the Cloudy Night article Refining Your Home Observation Site: Why Do It-Where Do It-How It's Done. It worked out okay although I struggle with the two star alignment for the GOTO scope, mostly because it was a new location and I had to get use to picking out some decent stars for the alignment. I wanted to check out Jupiter, I was trying see the Red Spot but it was not clear enough so I packed it in after 20 minutes.
Tonight I drove out to Emma.
I arrived just a few minutes after sunset, I setup the C8 next to the cemetery, while I was doing that Don Fritz arrived, he had his 127mm Antares Refractor with him but couldn't use it because it was knocked out of collimation. He'll fix the problem when he gets home. Neetu Arora and Collin Smith arrived with a friend about 8:30pm. Collin setup his 80mm AstroTech 80ED. My primary goal tonight was to watch the Ganymede transit of Jupiter, it was pretty cool watching the approach but Jupiter was a little too low for me to accurately pick out the moon as it proceeded across Jupiter.
We viewed M13, M7, M22, the Lagoon Nebula, Veil Nebula, Swan Nebula, North American Nebula, Uranus, Neptune, and M31. I was surprised how well my Orion Ultra-block filter worked on the nebulas, frankly I always considered it a light pollution filter and never used it at a dark sight before. I tried it after Collin suggested I do so, he had an O-III on his scope that did a very nice job.
Tom Heisey arrived around 10:00pm, he got out an assortment of binoculars, 10x50 Celestron with filters, 10x70 and 15x70. I really liked his 10x50, I could pick out a fair bit going through Sagitarius and on up to Deneb.
The moon came up at around midnight and we packed it in.