All in all it was a pretty good night!
Harold Goldner, Dana Priesing, and I arrived at Lou Varvarezis' place, to variable cloud cover.
However, not long after astronomical twilight, I was looking at M87, and was surprised to see its neighboring mag 11-12 galaxies, despite the poor conditions. The mag 11 neighbor was easily apparent in my 10", and the two 12th magnitude galaxies were visible with averted vision. M104 was visible through sucker holes in the clouds. The cloud cover began to thicken, and Dana packed up and left around 11. The rest of us went inside to watch the Phillies game for a bit.
With one observer sacrificed to the weather gods, we all know by now that the clouds would quickly subside, and by 11:30 the sky was mostly clear. The seeing was quite good, despite poor predictions. Jupiter was great, even near the horizon. We got a good view of the Great Red Spot, and lots of detail was apparent in the bands. I got to test out my Baader Nd filter, which did a good job of bringing out details. With the filter, Jupiter was a bit more contrasty, and just seemed to snap into focus a little better with the filter inserted. My light blue filter was also somewhat useful in upping the contrast, but I'd give the nod to the Baader filter.
I then found Ceres, which is near opposition in southern Ophiuchus, in a relatively easy star field. Since it was magnitude 7.0 (which is almost as bright as it ever gets) Harold was able to find it in his 10x50 binocs as well.
With the clouds gone and the sky getting a little darker after midnight as local light sources died down, I went down the list of usual suspects - a few of the Leo and Virgo galaxies, M81/M82, M5, M13, M22, M11, M8, M17, M71, M27, M57, the Veil, V Aql (a nice carbon star), gamma Vir, and we went in front of the house (where the southern horizon is better) andchecked out M7 in binoculars.
By about 1 AM Saturn was high enough to view. It was still very low but we could see the Cassini division and some of the brighter moons. By then, Harold had left, and Lou was fading, so I went back to Jupiter, just in time to see Ganymede enter into eclipse. I estimated that it took a bit over 5 minutes for Ganymede to dim to invisibility, from when I first noted a decrease in brightness.
(After getting home, I did a quick calculation, based on Ganymede's diameter and orbital info, and found that it should take 8 minutes to cross its own diameter in space (and hence about that long to completely enter Jupiter's shadow), which is consistent with what I observed. )
By then it was a little after 2, and the moon was just coming over the treetops, so I headed home. I made a stop at our usual observing site in Green Lane Park, where bathroom buildings were recently installed, to replace the porta-potties which previously did service there. Unfortunately, I found that the bathroom doors were locked, with the lights still on and shining through windows above the doors. From our usual area on the observing field the lights were nearly as bright the last quarter moon, which means that they will significantly impact dark adaptation (although it is still possible to observe from there). There are three separate bathroom buildings in three separate areas, all generally toward the south - in other words, the worst possible configuration for us! Unless something changes, this site is much less useful for deep-sky observing.
The Knight Rd. site about a mile further up is unaffected by this, though. That site isn't quite as convenient as the main site off Green Lane Rd., but is about equally dark, and there is no gate to potentially block access.