Titan shadow transit of Saturn

It's been a frustrating observing season, with hazy skies, poor seeing, and marine layers rolling in every night.  The night of 6/15-16 was to feature a rare shadow transit of Titan across Saturn.  This happens every 18 years or so, and there will be several more transits in the coming months, but since we're heading into fire season, I wanted to be sure to see this one.  For this transit the shadow would move close to the middle of Saturn, while the others would be more toward the polar region and be somewhat more difficult to see.

I drove up to Henry Coe in the late evening, intending to get above the Bay's marine haze and to have a good view to the east.  I emailed the rangers a couple days in advance, but the gate was locked when I arrived, and there weren't any rangers at the visitor's center.  I parked outside the gate and carried all my gear to the other end of the lot, with a view of the eastern horizon.

I used my C8 on the G11 mount.  The mount is overkill but was actually a good decision since it remained windy all night.  Transparency was on the poor side and seeing was atrocious.  I had some pointing problems with the mount (I'm not used to it yet), so I didn't bother with any purposeful observing.  I brought my night vision device and am very pleased I can reach focus with it in prime configuration in the C8, achieving a nicely illuminated image at a "normal" image scale of around a half degree.  I made a round of various Messier & NGC globular clusters in Sagittarius -- all of which I've seen before, so I didn't take notes.  All the globular were resolved to their cores, bright, and the star fields were very rich.  The views are at least as good as my 20-inch would be visually in a dark site.  I'm very happy to have the versatility of using the device for more than just large nebula.

But I did view some large nebula all the same.  I scanned around using Ha and the 3x objective looking many things I've seen before.  The sky was washed out and the nebula were not as bright or detailed as they would be from a darker site.  All the same, I noticed to the far southern horizon Gum 53 (of which NGC 6188 is a brighter portion, below Sivan 8.  It was very large, fairly bright (even considering it was in Gilroy's light dome), and dual fan shaped -- two wings with a dark V-shape in between.  Astro photos show many dark nebula trunks coursing through it, but I didn't see such detail since I was using low magnification, but I did see very faint streams of nebula running between it up to Sivan 8. 

Around midnight I tried to sleep in my car, intending to wake up at 3:00am when Saturn should be well risen and the shadow transit should be approaching its midpoint.  But I didn't sleep very well and got up at 2:30am.  I looked at the 3rd quarter moon for a while.  Seeing was still soft, transparency a little worse, and it was still gusting.  Saturn looked very poor when I first slewed to it, I could barely make out any bands and only saw a small formless dark smudge where the shadow should be.  I touched-up my collimation and continued to observe.  After 20 minutes or so, at 3:30am, the seeing settled down enough to give me a fine view of the small dark dot of shadow, just below the very thin rings (which appeared as a dark slash through the planet -- viewed nearly edge on they weren't reflecting so much light back).  In moments of best seeing, I could see the very small, tiny points of Dione & Tethys, and even Enceladus which was a brightening on the outer edge of the rings.  Rhea was easy and bright further west from the system.

  

Mission accomplished, I started packing at 4:00am and drove home.  There are more events in the weeks to come and hopefully I can see them (maybe even from home).