The temperature was 50 F when I opened the gate at 4:15 PM Saturday evening and was 35 F when I locked up at 9:20 PM. But it wasn’t the cold that sent everyone home early, it was our scopes getting blurry from the dew. It was 60% humidity and all that water in the air was also causing the planets Venus and Jupiter to shimmy so bad that we could not see the belts around the big planet. One other member said he was not able to find Neptune so the seeing was bad.

We could see the blue & gold stars of Alberio and the Trapezium in the Orion Nebula and a fuzzy M31 Andromeda Galaxy. Val said he was unable to see the Comets and neither one of us was able to see NGC 752 or M33, the Pinwheel Galaxy. Vittal did get the double star cluster under Cassiopeia to look great early on in his DOBs.

We did see the bright Iridium flare at 5:33 PM and the entire evening was cloud free. It also was not muddy after all the recent rain. We had a couple of Celestron 14″ scopes brought out by new member Dave and also Kyle Coker which sure have a lot of light gathering ability.