Sorry I missed this; was planning on Sat. night until the sky clouded over. Nice details in your report Daniel. --- On Sat, 7/18/09, daniel turner <outwest112@yahoo.com> wrote:
From: daniel turner <outwest112@yahoo.com> Subject: [Utah-astronomy] 5 comets To: utah-astronomy@mailman.xmission.com Date: Saturday, July 18, 2009, 6:28 PM
I went to Wolf Creek on Thursday night to try to beat the comming monsoon season. Below is my observing report.
DT
Time: 2009 July 17 0230-0700 UT.(Thursday night MDT) Location: Duschenne Ridge at Wolf Creek Pass equiptment: 17.5 inch dobsonian conditions: 5% clouds clearing later. breeze was gone by sunset.Temp 55F falling to 38F. transparency: very good 4/5. stars visable to 5 degrees elevation milky way star cloud visable to 10 degrees elevation. no star halos. Seeing: poor 2/5. even after boundry layer was gone from the mirror, cells a third the size of the aperture disrupted seeing. Can't split EPS BOO. Trio of mule deer include two 4 point bucks and a doe passed to the west. Earlier heard hoof drumming.
At nautical twilight naked eye, M7 direct vision M6 averted vision. meteor in CAP from the direction of ALPHA AQL. 0441 UT. M10 in the twilight was alignment check. Saturn at a half hour past sunset was only 22 degrees high and in very poor seeing. a half hour later seeing improved for view of 5 moons on the east side three in a tight cluster close in. At an hour past sunset saturn at 16 degrees. C/2006 W3 (Christensen): at an hour past sunset. off the eastern wingtip of Cygnus was still low . Stellar nucleus with a soft round comma no tail seen. later at astro twilight. comma is offset, nucleus is not in the center. Large but without a swept back appearance. used 220x and 70x but could not tease out a tail from the background star field which is rather busy. P/2009 L2 (Yang-Gao): a bit of nebular fluff with three dim stars embedded in it. None of the surrounding stars have any haze so it's not an atmospheric effect. at civil twilight to the southwest: C/2008 Q3 (Garradd): just a hazy patch like an unresolved globular cluster no nucleus or tail. 88P/Howell: an averted vision haze object, no nucleus or tail much smaller than Garradd. 65P/Gunn: the size of Howell but brighter, direct vision object. no nucleus or tail. in DEL ngc7006 globular small some structure but not resolved into individual stars. ngc6891 planetary neb a star with a good size averted vision disk of haze around it. ngc6905 planetary neb large flat disk with a star that winks in and out with averted vision. very pretty. ngc6934 globular nice structure resolve star in outer two thirds. Dense core like a core collapse. random globulars ngc6441 globular in the stinger of SCO next to G SCO. too low even at transit to resolve more then two thirds. No planetary seen. Palomar 8 globular off the spoon in SAG. irregular hazy patch that resolves with effort. like M71. Palomar 11 globular in AQL elliptical hazy patch. best seen by sweeping past it to make it stand out among the field stars. ngc6712 globular In SCT irregular fully resolved accross the middle. low degree of concentration. a tour of the milky way M16 pillars visable among the cluster stars M17 extends far beyond the check mark normally seen. M20 visable color difference between emmision and reflection. M8 hint of creation columns in the dark lanes like M16. M31 naked eye object just above the trees. In the telescope 2 dust lanes visable. extent doesn't reach to M32 against the sky background. M101 only partially visable as the transparency deteriorates with the falling temperature. closing down at 1:30am one half hour prior to moonrise the sky in that direction was visably lighter with the twilight of the 30% moon. Jupiter at low elevation still in the poor seeing.
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