My wife’s sister and brother-in-law came out to Lake Riverside for dinner and meteor watching last night. We had blue-foot chicken that my wife had found at Surfas Restaurant Supply, found the morning after we watched “Battle Blue-foot Chicken” on The Food Network’s Iron Chef America. A bit of a coincidence, and the chicken was good. The thighs were not fat and plump like regular store chicken, and the flavor was good. Altogether a nice dinner.

I missed all the satellites from Heavens-Above, but that is not much of a loss. I got out the C-8 (with now non-functioning drive motor) and we had a small observing run. It included M57, the Ring Nebula, Albireo, and two very nice globular clusters in Scorpius, M80 and M4. M80 is a small, tight ball of stars. M4 is much larger and is visible with binoculars, as we discovered last night.

Meteor watching was OK, with my daughter reporting 16 seen over 2 hours from 10pm to midnight. I stayed up until 1am, but did not see too many more. The Milky Way was quite beautiful, and Andromeda was visible to the naked eye. Very pretty.

I hope to see more meteors tonight, and have another visual-only, manual observing run.