Table Mountain is outside Ellensburg, Washington at about 6300 feet of elevation. Check the date above and put those two facts together. Yep, it was butt-numbingly cold. It froze overnight, but worse than that was the early dewpoint. We only got about 2.5 good hours of observation. Fortunately, those two hours were excellent. I'll summarize the equipment we used and the objects we found (caveat: I'm just starting out and Todd is a year or so ahead of me, with a few extra dark sky star parties under his belt, so this was definitely not a Messier Madness race).
Equipment
Todd's gear:
5 inch Cinta refractor, equatorial mount with the usual set of eyepieces and an ALP filter.
Olympus OM-1 for sky field exposures
Tirion's Cambridge Star Atlas, Nightwatch charts
Atmospheric Light Pollution filter
Green Laser pointer (this thing rules)
Chris's Equipment:
Meade LX-200 8" Schmidt-Cassegrain. This model has the motor drive and equitorial wedge. I'm spending my time learning to star hop and dead reckon, so I mounted the scope flat and didn't use the drive this trip (I don't have a travel battery anyway).
Tirion's Cambridge Star Atlas and Nightwatch
Nikon Coolpix 900
Meade 9mm, 12, 15, 22, 25mm Super Plossl eyepieces with Celestron Ultima SX Barlow (2x)
General Conditions
Surprisingly enough, there were several other groups on the mountain that night. We saw some nice equipment including Takahashi apochromat refractors, SBIG CCD cameras, a 12" Meade (the big brother to my scope) and a whopping 17.5 " truss-mounted Dob. Unfortunately, it was also bow and black powder hunting season so there were some hunters with white light discipline problems at the site.
As I said earlier, it was quite cold. Todd and I put up his tent and layered up all the clothing we brought. Truthfully, I didn't expect such a chill (the afternoon wind was biting) and I'm glad I packed the extra layers.
Objects
Dumbbell Nebula
Andromeda Galaxy
Wild Duck
Whirlpool Galaxy
M106
Aurora Borealis
Pleiades
Software I've been playing with...
I'm a computer guy, working for that big company in Redmond, Wa (yeah, that one)..so I have several computers around the house. It's natural to want to combine the astronomy gig with the fulltime job. Here's what I've been experimenting with:
DeepSky 2000 for the PC
XEphem running under XDarwin/OroborosX on my Ti PowerBook
Pocket DeepSky for the PocketPC
Thinking about getting "The Sky" from bisque software for my Ti PowerBook