I arrived at Lynden at about 10:30 pm and it was already starting to get foggy.
I set up the Great White Scope (GWS) out in a field where long views to the east and south would be available, and was appalled by the fog. There was so much fog i could play my laser through it and cut it in cross section. It was intriguing to see there were areas of no-fog embedded in the fog, and that it extended between 10 and 50 feet above me. At times there were layers of fog with fresh air between them.

Should i have known from the weather reports? They called for clear skies. I see the CSC still reports good transparency for Wednesday morning. They have not swept it under the rug yet. I do see a bright red patch on the Humidity line though. That will be a clue for next time.

Rather than take down the scope and try again tomorrow, i decided to wait out the fog, if that’s possible. The key curiosity was whether waiting out the fog is ever rewarded. I planned to use this evening as a standard to decide when to pack up in the future, if fog was coming in. I wanted to know if the skies could be redeemed. So i waited.

The Kendrick dew guard (DG-3) powered by a tiny 9v battery, on my secondary kept it fine all night, and although the scope was dripping wet by morning, the mirrors persisted just fine.

I also had a dew heater resistor-strip made by Tim on my findersope, and it was keeping it dry to the touch on the outside and just fine on the inside.
I lacked a dew heater on the eyepiece of my finderscope, which eventually needed some sympathy. I took the red dot finder off for a while and kept it in my pocket, in anticipation of clearer skies.

I perched my XTi on the GWS and took some constellation photos of Orion, and worked on getting the focus just right. I used my F1.8 50 mm lens. It fits the entire constellation of Orion into one shot.

I really need a gadget to support time exposures now. 30 seconds at a time does not yield much detail in each frame.

I had some fun with my laser watching tiny fog particles blowing through the beam,
and thought about what gets rid of fog… wind. But there was really only the gentlest of a breeze, and it was not blowing anything away. I wondered if starting the car could create some kind of fog-busting updraft, but i could not drive around in circles because that would kick up a lot of dust on the field. It was interesting to note that in some directions the laser seems to expire in the fog, and in others, it breaks through and the beam can be seen dimly extending further into the sky.

A big enough scope can see through fog – not.

But higher up the sky looked fine. The pleiades were shining out at me, so i trained the scope on them for a while. I would get them again much later after my Sequential Messier Marathon (SMM) made some progress.

Mars was bulging and contracting, occasionally looking round for a second or 2.

I decided to make sure the fog was not going to block all progress by looking for and finding M1. It was easy to see once i had the right spot in the sky. Thus encouraged, i went for a stroll, after putting the cover on my GWS and leaving the dew busters running.
I returned to the scene at about 2:30 am.

As the 3:45 am rise time of M41 approached, i started picking out stars near Canis Major. It turned out the sky was adequate above the horizon, but the horizon was completely fogged in.

I found the open cluster M41 at about 4:34 am, and made a sketch of it. It looked fine in the GWS, at 73x magnification. M42 and M43 were easy to find and see in the night sky, by then Orion was quite high up. M42, and M43 yielded some details and nebulosity which i also tried to sketch. The trapezium was easily split by the GWS.

M44 was a real devil to find in the fog. I could only see Castor and Pollux in Gemini, and there’s a page break in my sky atlas between there and M44, so judging distances and angles was really hard. The fog made star hopping almost impossible, and too difficult for me either way.

Venus was a nice sharp crescent moon shape. It is indeed very very bright. When it first showed up it was high enough that i did not see it rise, and i thought it must be an approaching plane. About 10 minutes later when it had not moved i realized my mistake.

Noting that both Venus and M44 were on the ecliptic helped to find M44, and eventually i could spot it in the fog, in the finderscope, and bring it in with the GWS.

M46 near Canis Major was to prove too difficult to find. Then the fog came in so thick i could hardly see the buildings, and the laser showed it to be a solid layer more than 50 feet thick. It was time to stop. The sun was going to rise in an hour and there’s no way i could see DSO’s against this background. I started the car and put the heater on, making a bit of a drying kiln, to put pieces of the scope in, after toweling them off. It took a while but my buddy and i had a chat while i disassembled the GWS and put it safely back in the car.

It never occurred to me the CSC would report clear skies all night but i would be fogged in. Now i have a new appreciation of what can go wrong at a star party. I would say it was not the best of nights, but now i know that the dew busters i have can stand up to anything. I just need some eyepiece heaters now. I am looking forward to crisp winter nights with good seeing, where dew will not be able to send me home, no matter what.