Hello, all -- I had an interesting morning of observing today. Some aspects might be interesting. First, the where: I went to Rockport State Park, pulled into the drive, and set up before getting to the gate. There's a sign that says something about fishermen only. This spot has decent horizon to the N, E, and S. There are some lights to the E from the gate, which would probably interfere with more serious observing. On the way, there's a scenic viewpoint that may have been darker. I didn't really hear much traffic, so that may have been OK. Rockport is under 40 minutes from my home in west Murray, and I timed it as about 26 minutes from the 1300 E onramp to I-80. I would go back. Decent darkness. I wouldn't look west, because of glow from the city, but if I wanted to look west, I'd go to Clover Springs. Temp was probably about 20. I was too afraid to go anywhere higher altitude, but the cold didn't really bother me in the end. I got there and set up. I searched my bag everywhere -- I had left my finder at home. Ouch. Anyway, I decided to press on without it, which made life a lot more difficult. All observations I made were with a 6" equatorially mounted f/5 reflector and a 25 mm Plossl. It was "galaxies only" day. To see how well I could dead-reckon without a finder, I started with M51 and companion - both were very bright. So the site seemed dark enough. Moved to the Leo Trio - also easy. My goal was to finish the Messier list. I almost made it. I had to clear out the Virgo cluster. Since Vindemiatrix was barely above the horizon, I thought I'd start from Denebola and go the other way. This failed miserably. I _could not_ find M98. After about 15 minutes, I thought I'd try from the other direction. This also didn't go well, since it was harder for me to decide I had actually gotten Vindemiatrix in the eyepiece. Finally, when I was about to look back at my chart, I noticed two galaxies in the eyepiece. They turned out to be M59/M60 (I thought I saw one more - which would be NGC 4638 based on where it was located, but I'm not sure). Not being sure that I had started from the right place, I wasn't sure if they were M59/60 or M86/84. I panned west and found another, then another, then another pair. So, problem solved: first pair was M59/60, then I got M58, then M87, then M86/84. I backed up and found M89/90. I got a little lost after this. Eventually I got myself back to M86/84 and tried to creep north and west. I eventually saw a sliver and hoped that something in that neighborhood was edge-on. Yep, M98. Got M99 and M100 from there, then backtracked to M88/M91. Spica wasn't up yet, so I used Corvus to find M104. I moved over to Saturn and made about 10 tries of hopping from Saturn to M61, which finally worked. The last ones on my list were M83 and M85. M83 wasn't up and wasn't going to be up, so I left that for later. I made some attempt to find M85, but it seems that all the somewhat bright stars in Coma are about the same magnitude, so I couldn't be sure I was pointing correctly without a finder. So I left it behind as well. One lesson I learned from this is how much easier all of this was because for once I decided to polar align (well, I just put the north leg of my tripod in the right general direction). Without my reflex finder, I was actually hopping by trying to count degrees (starhopping absolutely perplexes me - I can only use the red dot). This worked quite well, given that I was looking for a number of objects in the same area arranged more-or-less E-W. Without the alignment, I think I would have seen the galaxies, but not have been able to make the IDs. So I write this for beginners like myself, who have read, as I have, all of these things from more advanced observers, but never do them. I never polar-align or hop to anything. For those more experienced - I set up my 6" after the drive without collimating, and the mirror is really dusty, but I still got decent results, so I think this says something to recommend the site. It's really close to Salt Lake. In addition to the Messiers, I found about 6-8 more NGC galaxies, so I guess it was dark enough. Good times. ---- Rev. Michael A. van Opstall Department of Mathematics, University of Utah Office: JWB 313 opstall@math.utah.edu