The weather here is typical summer monsoon season; that means frustratingly hot and humid days and cloudy nights. Sometimes if we're lucky it rains, we had a couple of big storms this past week. But the "wash" behind my house is still dry, despite being one of the primary channels for water flow from the mountains.
As far as astronomy goes, many amateurs (as well as professionals) around here pretty much shut down for the summer. I've been anxious to get out to our dark sky site but it hasn't happened for a while. Basically if you want to do any observing around here, you grab the opportunity whenever it briefly presents itself.
Last night was predicted to be mostly clear, so I dropped by my friend Dean's house for an imaging session. A near new moon meant that a nice dark sky was possible. Unfortunately the clear sky at 8:30 turned into a mostly cloudy sky by 10:00. I was planning to image M8, the Lagoon Nebula, for about 4 hours but only ended up getting 51 minutes of clear and a few shots in red, green, and blue between clouds for a total of 45 minutes of color. That's not a lot, but it was enough to produce the image above. I think that I will try to continue gathering data for this one some night soon, so I have not done a lot of the basic clean-up and color balancing on this yet.
M8 is a really great object, visible to the naked eye just above the spout of the "Teapot" in Sagittarius. Through a telescope, the dark lane is clearly visible in an eyepiece.
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