Arrived about 22:10, late as hell. I tried to get my wife to eat sooner but when I arrived hungry at 18:50 after errands, including dropping our youngest daughter off at Ransom Canyon to see her best friend, and passing my fellow South Plains Astronomy Club members doing solar observing at the Firestation, she'd just finished a grapefruit and wasn't hungry right then.  So we finished dinner around 9 PM  😐  oh well

Great to see everyone under the stars after such a long hiatus — even Lesley was there, wow!  And stars we had.  Despite all the haze from Canadian smoke that had blown off the Atlantic and back from the Gulf up to west Texas all day Saturday, the stars shown bright.  Even the Coathanger asterism, Brocchi's Cluster, seemed faintly visible naked eye, straight up as it was.

When I arrived, the leader of Titans, Saturn, was getting higher in the sky, about a week before opposition, but I resisted putting my scope on him right away, knowing Cronus would indeed rise higher, clearing the thick, low-angle atmospheric muck plaguing the heavenly host near the horizon.

Tom Heisey had his Celestron 80mm refractor near where I setup, and the Double Cluster at the Perseus-Cassiopeia border looked very impressive in his Pentax Zoom eyepiece at lowest power.  Probably finally ready somewhere near 22:30, I put my AstroTech 28mm UWA into the focuser for a nice wide 3.6° field (23.2x), to verify if what I thought was the Coathanger actually was.  Yes sir, it was.
  BBC Sky At Night       So at least as one got towards zenith, seeing wasn't terrible.

Not that it was great.  Later in the evening, Patrice and I would try to split Delta Cygni, even employing the 3.5mm T6 for 186 power, to no avail — just funky, fluctuating diffraction rings using this too-powerful-for-conditions eyepiece.  So seeing was far from perfect, but the Coathanger was kinda naked eye so there ya go.

One of the nicest things to see in the 130SLT with the AT28UWA is the Andromeda family of galaxies, M31-M32-M110, and, overall, they did not disappoint this night.  M110 is VERY faint at Ransom Canyon, enough background light to make this galaxy shy, but it gave a fleeting, ghost-like appearance for us cognoscenti who knew where to look 😉    M32, by contrast, was a piece of cake.  At a mere 23.3x and a 3.6° field, Andromeda is really something to behold in the 130SLT.

After Andromeda, I was inspired by Scott and Gary, the Club's only two PhD's in Physics, to seek out M11, the Wild Duck Cluster in Scutum.  Still using the AT 28mm UWA, the cluster's many faint stars at this low power impart the ghostly appearance of nebulosity.  An unanticipated optical treat!

Sagitta's M27 was a bit less dramatic, however, and the low power only framed well this space cadet cotton ball against the Milky Way.  But in Cassiopeia, NGC 457, the ET Cluster (or Owl), looked friendly as ever, floating about outer space, plenty of room.  Earthlings, phone home.  My reflector presented both the Coathanger and ET in the "correct" orientation, instead of upside down as they would've appeared in binoculars or a refractor or M/SCT-with-diagonal.  This was the end of the road this evening for my AT28UWA, which had shown a number of bigger targets well (and a few not so big that were, well, kinda small).

Inserting the TV 5mm Nagler T6 for 130 power, I was able to split the Double-Double of Epsilon Lyrae into four components, tight as could be but still separable.  While in Lyra, Tom turned us on to the Delta Lyrae cluster, Stephenson 1.  This is a nice, easy find star cluster to come back to the rest of the summer and into fall.  The cluster fit nicely in the 11mm T6 at 59x and 1.4° True Field of View.

Robb was enjoying the views through the C130SLT, so asked if he could put the scope on NGC 7789, Caroline's Rose Cluster in Cassiopeia.  Staying with the 11mm T6, I gladly obliged, being only vaguely familiar with its location, and soon Robb had Caroline's Rose come to mysterious life in the glass.  Again, at this magnification in this scope (59x), the surrounding star field imbued a sense of nebulosity, with the glorious petals of William Hershel's sister's discovery faintly manifesting the 18th Century's namesake, seance-like.  8,000 light years away, 50 light years across, and 1.6 billion years old, this beautiful cluster takes a ½ degree in the sky, or the size of a full moon measured in arcminutes. 

Photographs of this beauty give too much detail, not enough artistic essence.  Sketches tend to be short on both compared to the eye, yet approximate a greater measure of optical revelation than a photo.
Hand sketch of Caroline's Cluster by frank5817 of Mesa, Arizona on CloudyNights.com

But now, later in the evening, it was time for Saturn to take his turn, and take it he did.  In the Nagler 5mm T6 at 130 power, the C130SLT put up a Titan-worthy view, Cronus now flying high in the southeast.  The rings are tilted at only 9° this opposition cycle, so the Cassini Division is pretty hard to see near the "tight" portion of the rings by the globe, but out at the ansae, it could be spotted easily.  There was some banding on the ole planet, too, a very pleasant view.  Collimating this scope before going out puts up such nice images, folks!

More detail than the view through my scope, but gives you the idea ...
Excellent image courtesy Donald W. Capone III, Ph.D., from CloudyNights.com

It was past midnight, and I called my daughter to tell her she had to get ready to go. Of course, she begged to stay and spend the night with her good friend at Ransom Canyon, but since arriving home without her would mean an unhappy wife, well, she was coming home, and straight after packing my gear into the car.  Great to see Gary, Scott, Lesley, Robb, Barbara, Tom, Kenny, Patrice, and earlier, Steve.  Albert Darisse had his 8" dob he recently bought from Doreen.  There was a new guy with his 8" dob whose name escapes me now, and Bob.

Bob had brought out his 16" F/4.5 dob, which everyone anticipated looking through, just to have one of his primary cables get accidentally ruined in the mechanism of his dobsonian, disabling his ServoCat controller.  I'm sure it was more disappointing for him, but hopefully he'll be able to bring this big scope out again, since it was the largest aperture on the field for the evening.  I can only imagine Saturn, or the Lagoon or Trifid Nebulae through that big guy.  Reckon we'll have to do this again.

A nice night out at Ransom Canyon, the heavenly host always put on a good party — heavenly bodies not something to miss, amigos.  Buenas noches.