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.

We adopted two terrier mixes from the Moreno Valley animal shelter - Orion and Astro. They were brought to the shelter after being found on the street just a couple months old. They seem pretty happy here, cruising around our place, investigating and chasing each other around. They spent a good amount of time snoozing and sleeping - probably much more peaceful here than in the shelter. Here is a couple pictures of them from the shelter and then back at home tonight.

We spent some time last week in Wisconsin looking for a new place to build our home. After failing to be able to build at the Mill site , we were looking for around 10 acres of vacant semi-wooded land with some elevation change and a southern view to build on. We found a great place with a road going up to the edge of a high sandstone bluff. In the Google Earth image below, South is towards the upper right corner. We put an offer in on the property this week, hopefully it works out - this is going to be one great place to build a home. From the top of the bluff, there is nearly a 180deg view of the eastern horizon looking out around 20 miles! There aren't many other homes in the area so light pollution won't be a problem for building an observatory. Will post more once everything works out and we will start posting development plans at www.ourmodernhome.com if we get that far.