I arrived to find Michael Barnett with his GSO 8" dob readied on the field.  Mark Smith was there, but had yet to set up his 6" Schmidt-Newtonian, wanting to park up closer given the rather hefty equatorial pedestal mount the Meade comes with.  Ken Kroft was also there to enjoy the heavens, coming straight from work so without a telescope from his optical arsenal.  Barbara Saint Croix, Kelly and Zach greeted my arrival, while Elizabeth Sabet showed up close behind.  Somewhat later after I was setup and observing, and just as the words "the only Ph.D.'s in Physics in the Club" left my lips in conversation, Gary Leiker and Scott Harris (and Lesley,who doesn't have a Ph.D. in Physics, but is married to one 😉) showed up.  So not a bad crowd for a Friday night viewing assembled from scratch, mostly three hours earlier.

With my lame, ancient Orion laser pointer, did my best to point out Saturn, Vega, Cygnus, Cassiopeia, Gemini, Polaris, Jupiter, the Pleiades, Taurus and Orion to the good people who might not know.  Mine leaves something to be desired, but Michael Barnett's laser pointer was another story, and presenly on my Christmas list to Miss Claus, a bargain at 10 bucks.  A special "thank you" to Michael for sharing the url from Amazon for such a useful device!

I've become accustomed to my Long Perng 102mm F/7 refractor, the AstroTech version, and its wide field of view compared to my dob -- perhaps not the best choice this evening, December 8th.  With the skies so unsteady from all the turbulence above, nobody would exclaim at Jupiter like our last outing under September's more transparent sky, moon-washed with light as it was.  In fact, with my 16mm T5 in the focuser for a mere 75 power, Jupiter at culmination in the celestial sphere wavered from a precious few moments of sharp lucidity, followed by 10-second-plus lapses of fuzzy mess.  The four Galilean moons draped mighty Jove in pairs left and right, but they were themselves blurry, without the pinpoint accuracy an 8" dob normally affords.  And the 1200mm focal lenght of an F/6 8" dob?  Well, that's not really put to much use under such jetstream-plagued heavens.  Now the 200+mm light gathering was nice in the fleeting moments of clarity, but they were a tough compromise as many of the targets would demonstrate.  And for the record, Saturn was too low in the southwest to be any good, and wasn't.  The poor King of Titans was a blurry semblance of his normal glory, gone the Cassini Division, globe banding, and really, anything very interesting a steadier sky would have granted.  So we turned to less power-hungry targets, more like one might default to with a shorter ED refractor.  Hmm.

But since it was low and heading down, I decided to split Albireo at the head of Cygnus the Swan (or foot of the Northern Cross, as your seeing goes).  Being the spouse of a Punjabi, I'm rather fond of interracial binary stars, par for the course.  And in the celestial neighborhood, I put M57, the Ring Nebula, into the eyepiece.  M57 —  what can I say?

Not to bemoan the wonderful 8" dob too much, I should point out the things it did do, no doubt, better than anyone's 4" refractor might.  I was wont to split Almach, high as it was in the sky, but as is my habitual error, put my scope on Mirach instead.  As a rabbit-hole diversion and matter of historical perspective, I am oft to put my a scope on Mirach when trying to split Almach, as the following demonstrates.  LONG ago and far away, early August 2002, I attended the StarWalk at Copper Breaks State Park, well before the Koch brother had built Three Rivers.  I was in the naissance of my astronomy revival, somewhat dormant from 5th grade Criterion RV-6 days of the mid-70's, owning a mere Orion ST-80 on EQ-1 mount.  I was setup next to a young man (to me in 2002) who volunteered for Koch and was attempting to manage both 15" and 18" Obsession telescopes, busy as we were before the crowds.  This young man noticed I possessed some clue about how to operate a telescope and asked if I wouldn't mind driving the 15" Obession so he might pay full attention to the 18".  "Uh, sure", I said flatly, trying to manage my exuberance and act cool in the face of this optical Vegas-style bonanza.  So I decided I'd split Almach, since I reckon I'd been preparing to do that in my modest ST-80, a stretch for the lowly creature of that optical genus.  I navigated the mighty Obsession, with the aid of the wonderful Telrad on its upper cage on Mirach instead of Almach, and, lo and behold, found something I wasn't expecting at all. Yellow-white Mirach was without a double star, yet had a very interesting neighbor, indeed.  I had "discovered" Mirach's Ghost, the elliptical galaxy just beside Mirach.  At the time (and before the S&T Pocket Atlas existed), I had no idea what it was, since the Orion full-sky fold out sheet I had made no reference to anything by Mirach.  I had to return home to Lubbock and get on the budding internet to find out what it was I'd seen (probably via Yahoo! in those most ancient of internet days, yea verily), NGC 404.  Well, on December 8^th, 2023, I was re-acquanted with my old friend in the sky, 10 million light years away.  And I got to turn Michael Barnett onto it, too.  Thereafter I split Almach, Gamma Andromedae, a nice interracial pair, gold primary with blue-white secondary.

With only a dash of the dramatic contrast of Albireo or Almach, we also split Eta Cassiopeiae.  Rigel wouldn't split, nor NGC 2024, the Flame Tree by Alnitak, show itself, but that was the transparency for the evening — bad for Jupiter at culmination, and worse for everything else closer to the horizon.

Given the low-power cap we'd been handed by the Fates for the evening, I removed the 16mm T5 and TV Equalizer from the focuser installing the venerable AT 28mm UWA.  In the 8" Orion, I muster 1.95° at 43 power providing the widest field I can obtain at the lowest power using my equipment.  With this configuration, I set about looking at various targets, the first request from Elizabeth Sabet, M45, the Pleiades.  So off I went and although they seemed happy enough with it, I am unsatisfied with a mere 2° field for the Pleiades, which look much, much better with a 2½° (or more) vista.  They're just one of many targest in the night sky that beg for a W-I-D-E field, and are cramped without one.  I mean, does Subaru, the Seven Sisters, fit in the eyepiece?  Well, yeah, but they don't really have any wiggle room, and their perimeter in the great celestial space is tightly confined.  The Pleiades look quite nice in 5° binoculars, but to see them in a well mounted 2½°-plus capable telescope is another order of heavenly delight.  To be fair, Michael had a pair of binoculars setup on a tripod, but I didn't look through them, given my own optical predilections and peculiarities concerning binocular vision.

The Double Cluster (NGC's 869 and 884) at the border of Cassiopeia and Perseus is another such target I find a bit cramped in a 2° field.  A little more forgiving than the Pleiades, it still looks better in a 2½° or more true field of field.  But a number of targets worked out quite well, like the Andromeda galaxy set, M31, M32 and M110.  This galactic group came through quite nicely, the extra aperture of the 8" mirror, in my opinion, offset the loss of true field of view.  In a same vein, a 2° field may not be the best way to catch Orion's sword, but it looked pretty nice, with M42 and M43 together in the field of view, and still able to make out the Trapezium, small as it was at 43 power.  Another target that I liked quite well in the 8" F/6 dob was the Veil Nebula through an O-III filter, principally bounded by the eastern Network Nebula (NGC 6992) and western Witch's Broom (NGC 6960) complexes, amongst others.  Although the Veil is about 3° in size in the night sky, and I've seen it this way in my 102 F/7 ED refractor with the AT 28mm UWA, you can't see the details anything like what an 8" scope shows.  Obviously, you're only getting part of the complex in a 2° limited scope, but the details are worth it.

One I've gotten used to in the 3°-plus field of the refractor is NGC 457, the ET Cluster.  But even in the tighter constraints of the dob, ET's charm still touches the heart, not floating as freely as in the refractor's view, but still welcoming with outstreched arms, and he's still floating free, if not as expansively.

And the four sequence open clusters of M35-M37-M36-M38 were well framed in the 8" dob.  As expected under the conditions, the worst this evening was M35 with the almost completely invisible NGC 2158.  Usually these are a nice pair with the more than 3.7 times distant NGC 2158 a ghostly nebulosity in appearance, but actually a more-distant open cluster.  Yet on this night, NGC 2158 could hardly be made out, low as M35 was in the foot of rising Gemini in the east.  As one goes "up" the chain into Auriga, M37 was its wonderous self, one of the best open clusters in the night sky, with a dominant, bright central star surrounded by a myriad of loyal attendants.  I like Jerry Hatfield's designation of M36 as the Zia symbol of the New Mexico flag, although one can see a spider as well, and sometimes called the Pinwheel Cluster.  At 4.34k light years, it's quite a bit farther than the Pleiades, but would appear in the sky similar, being of similar size, number and type of stars, were it only 444 light years away, like M45.  And the set ends at M38, the Starfish Cluster, with adjacent, ghostly NGC 1907, again, another open cluster about 1,200 light years past M35 from Earth's vantage.  Interesting how M35 and M38 bound the sequence in the sky, are in the correct order (unlike 37 & 36 in appearance in the sky), and serving as bookends both with ghostly, companion clusters much farther away from us.

I forgot my Orion magnetic counterweight for my XT8PLUS, which forced me to use tighten up the bearing cylinders, making motion more stiff than I'd have preferred.  Hadn't used it in a while and forgot about that.  Oh well.  I've forgotten more critical accessories in the past so reckon I did alright, having not used the dob in so long -- Long Perng the reason  ¿quizás?

Around 22:25 or so, the wind began to pick up, as the cold front descended from upper atmospheric turbulence to down-to-earth godawful, cold north wind gusts.  We packed up and bid Zach and Kelly farewell.