A nice night of summer stargazing

We drove out to Joshua Tree National Park yesterday with the telescopes and got there well before dark for the first time in a while. We set up in spot B15 of the Cottonwood Springs campground. We brought both the TeleVue NP101 and our 18" Obsession UC.

The sky was clear and it was a great night, warm (low just above 60F), 7/10 seeing, with a SQM reading of 21.53.

There weren't many people in the campground maybe 5 other sites taken in the B loop. We were set up next to two guys with telescopes also - Richard (from San Bernardino) and Bruce (from Moreno Valley). They had a large refractor (maybe 130mm) and a 10" Meade SCT.

We started off looking at Saturn, then moved to the Hercules star cluster M13, M51 Whirlpool Galaxy M51, Pinwheel Galaxy M101 (never really been able to see much detail), Ring Nebula M57 (could not make out the central star), Cat's Eye Nebula NGC6543 (appeared as a pale blue disk), the Veil Nebula (detail easily seen with OIII filter on 30mm Pentax XW), and the Sombrero Galaxy M104, then just cruised around looking for other galaxies in the area.
We then went poking through the Sagittarius region of the Milky Way looking for dark nebula. B86, the Inkspot was the neatest thing we saw all night - it is really amazing to see just how many stars there are in that one area alone.