We had only a few minor problems-cold Siberian August nights accompanied by abundant dew! That's why this year we are going to hold Astrofestival at the end of July (in spite of the shorter nights). Only one problem we'll have-it will be an almost planetless period-bright planets (other than Uranus and Neptune) will be seen only in the morning skies.

Our young astronomers were very much impressed when watching for the first time in their lives many interesting objects: very bright flashes of Iridium satellites, "Mir" and the International Space Station, the partial solar eclipse that achieved on our longitude the phase of 0.3, the Perseids at their maximum (which was a much more intensive shower than the Leonids in 1998), Comet Lee that every night changed the forms of its split tails directed to opposite sides.

Deep sky observers enjoyed the heavens here-filled with a lot of distant galaxies and nebulae-inaccessible sights for inhabitants of big cities. We captured pictures of galaxies and nebulae with a CCD camera through different nebular filters to obtain a monochromatic image. This work was necessary to prepare a paper for presentation of our results at the yearly conference for students of High Secondary School of Krasnoyarsk territory. The information obtained allowed us to perform a large volume of work on the treatment of these images and to estimate the electron concentration in the space of the nebula. It was very educational work for its participants because they had the opportunity to learn more about modem methods of scientific research...

An idea that has occupied my mind for some time is to make a large, portable, wooden Dobsonian. I made my final decision on this project after our first joint Russian-American star party in October 1998 (at a northern suburb of Los Angeles). Operation of these telescopes, skillfully made by our American colleagues, seemed to be quite easy to use and it convinced me that manual tracking at high magnification Is quite possible. I have at the moment a factory-made 530 mm parabolic mirror. I hope to have this instrument finished this coming summer and we presently have members of the club working on this project. The idea to build a large Dobsonian was born exclusively by our visit to the USA. During our Los Angeles star party, I saw that such a simple mount worked quite well and gave you all you want to see in the skies.

Our host, Bill Scott presented me with a videocassette, "John Dobson Tells About Making Dobsonian Telescopes"-excellent and detailed instructions on how to make all the parts of this kind of telescope. The Los Angeles Sidewalk Astronomers provided us with the hard copy of the plans, and now this work is going ahead!