On Thursday, Senior Editor Michael Bakich and I traveled to Tucson and then made the 3-hour drive to Rancho Hidalgo near Animas, New Mexico. We spent a couple days with a stellar array of amateur astronomers at the site, flummoxed by a very unusual event for this time of year — two straight cloudy nights. A weird, early season, monsoon-type flow was pushing clouds up from the south.

See more pictures from Dave and Michael's trip to Rancho Hidalgo.

On Saturday, our luck changed. We awakened to deep blue skies with a couple of scattered cumulus here and there — no big deal. Our group included Gene Turner, Loy Guzman, Michael, Ken and Rose Huggett of Solarscope on the Isle of Man, United Kingdom, Ohio educators Gloria Dunnivan of Kent State University and John Hairston, and several others. We trekked up to a site near the Arizona Sky Village (ASV), Gene’s development across the Arizona border, and drove our four-wheel-drive jeeps up a steep mountain road to arrive at the ASV’s 24-inch observatory dome site, at more than 6,000 feet elevation. Here we enjoyed viewing the scope itself and set up a Tele Vue apo, attached one of Ken Huggett’s amazing H-alpha filters, and checked out the Sun. It was an amazingly crisp sight, with little finger prominences and a flare visible with sharp details on the photosphere. It was such a terrific sight that deep-sky observers like Michael and I were awestruck!

We are hopeful that tonight we’ll get a great, dark sky and will set up the 30-inch telescope for a long session of viewing odd and sundry deep-sky objects. Stay tuned.