I must have had the most misgivings about the cloud cover, among the five of us at the gravel pit Friday night-Monday morning. But then it largely cleared, although clouds slid in from time to time. Everybody had a great experience, I think, but mine was delayed until the others had gone home. I had numerous glitches, starting with my go-to capability seeming to have gone to -- well, you know. I had set the approximate lattitude and roughly accounted for magnetic declination, then used the "easy align" procedure. The scope said I was aligned but it was so far off I couldn't easily find anything (yes, yes I should know the night sky better than I do.) At last I used the "one star" alignment method and discovered that I was off on both lattitude and north-aiming. With that corrected my scope aimed at anything I wanted to see, without a problem. Also, somewhere along the line my GPS unit had a terrible time getting a reading, then that cleared up. So by the time people were going home not long before moonrise, I started rolling. Then I checked my collimation, and thought it was horribly awry. Here's the humorous part: I think my main problem with that was that I was unprepared for how a hugely out-of-focus image would look with my extreme (f/3.3) reducer in place.) Also, I had all separator elements of the reducer on, when I only wanted one. So I tried to collimate, which only threw everything off much worse. In the end, I managed to get a few photos despite this set of mistakes. I have posted a view of M81 I took then, on the astrophoto page that Cynthia Blue provides for our group; it's the latest thing in my album. I had to trim out badly focused stars beyond the galaxy, which resulted from the problems with collimation and spacers. Also, the view was so grainy that I reduced it to 50 percent of the original size. This was only my second time out with the SBIG-402 and I hope to improve as time goes on. Guy is going to build a rack so I can mount my guide scope on top of the main telescope. Then I should be able to take much better guided photos. Meanwhile, I'm having fun and profiting by learning from my mistakes. The gravel pit really is a nice place to set up, with the bucolic countryside and a fine unobstructed expanse of the heavens. We heard deer whistle and horses whiney. But I have to admit, it got pretty cold. About 3:55, as I was working on a view of the great galaxy in Andromeda, the first hint of dawn just wiped out all contrast and I quit. Strangely enough, the about third-quarter moon did not put out enough light to bother me as much as I expected when I worked toward the north. Light either from SLC or the moon did reflect off a thin cloud cover and I think that made its way onto part of my M81 photo. In the morning, as I was driving along the pit road toward the highway, two deer were to the right, in the narrow space between the road and a barbed wire fence. When I drove up, one immediately leaped over the fence, in an amazing agile way -- I'd seen it before, but it is always surprising. The fence was pretty high and without taking a run, the deer just stretched up and jumped over like a cat jumps onto the kitchen counter. The second deer wasn't as confident about jumping and ran along the road for a stretch, and I worried it would bolt in front of my Jeep. Instead, it watched the fence as it ran, found an arch in the lower strand and ducked through in a flash. -- Best wishes, Joe