I got out again, so BOTH Wednesday and Thursday were AGNFA. Setup at 8 p.m. My buddy Steve Remick came on out and I got to see his 8" Orion Dobsonian come out of the box, get put together and saw first light. Once I helped him get his finderscope aligned, we looked at Venus, Mars and Saturn. He was like a kid on Christmas morning. We also saw 2 circumpolar satellites cross at 10:14 p.m. The one heading south brightened briefly to mag. -4, then faded to 5th mag. 8) He gets up real early, though, and pulled the pin at 10:30 p.m.
Then I hopped back on the Herschel hunt and bagged 10 of them. I took Jay McLaren's advice and once I found an object, "just stay in the same area and see if there are others around it". It paid off on 3 observations with multiples. (Thank you, Jay! 🙂 The NGC's last night were 4371, 4429, 4435, 4438, 4459, 4473, 4477 4442,4526 & 4535. The best of the bunch was the triple group of 4459, 4473 & 4477. 4442 was also very pretty, an elliptical galaxy in a FOV filled with chains of stars. The finale was 4526 along with 4535 which is big, but a GHOST! I'd like to see that one in Randy's big hitter.
The Moon rose at 1:05 a.m. I watched that for quite a while, but no Rimae Tresnecker and passed on Byrgius A at Lunar midday for now. The wind, which had been insistent all night, was getting stronger. Saturday night WILL be clear, and I'll finish off Lunar II on that night. If the Good Lord keeps giving us this nice stretch of astronomy weather, I'll finish off both Lunar II and the Herschel 400 this spring. 31 to go on the H400. What a thrill!