As soon as the moon is out of the picture for early evening (next week), it will mark the beginning of the prime season for looking for the Zodiacal light in the western sky as soon as it's dark enough. Absolutely pristine skies are not essential. I have seen it plainly from the Grantsville area, just off I-80 a few hundred yards. It's probably visible from SPOC if not too many local lights are on at the time. I'll award a prize of my choosing for the best Zodiacal light photo posted to the Gallery. Deadline will be March 30, so everyone has 8 weeks to pull something together. The image must be made during the contest period. Film or digital, both methods encouraged, digital processing or classic darkroom enhancement methods are allowed. In fact, to make it fair, we'll have a professional category and an amateur category, so folks like Rob don't blow the rest of us out of the water. The prizes will be some modest piece of astro hardware or literature from my "archives". Emphasis on "modest". Winners will be determined by jury votes, jurists to be chosen by me. Jurists may enter but may not vote for themselves. Entries will be judged from the posted Gallery submissions, no private submissions to the judges. If you don't want to set up a Gallery page just for your contest entry, I'm sure some of us already there will stick your photo up in one of our sections. Maybe we can have a dedicated page just for this, we'll see. Good luck to everyone! ____________________________________________________________________________________ Now that's room service! Choose from over 150,000 hotels in 45,000 destinations on Yahoo! Travel to find your fit. http://farechase.yahoo.com/promo-generic-14795097