I took out my Zhumell 8" dob to take a look at the event in my backyard in Orem. Temperature was actually quite nice to begin with, but got colder as the evening progressed. My 2" 25mm eyepiece gave some very pleasing views of the dark limb with some of the Pleiades in the background. If I kept the lit part of the moon out of the eyepiece I could see a number of stars in the cluster next to the dark limb, I don't know the sky well enough to be able to tell you which ones they were :-). This was maybe 6:30, 7pm or so. Switching over to my 9mm ep, I was able to watch the dark limb swallow up a couple of the members of the cluster. That was fun to watch. Either the seeing was better last night than previous nights in the last month, or I did a better job of collimating this time around. I recently collimated my laser collimator so maybe that helped in that department. This scope is proving oh-so-much nicer to use than the 4.5" Bushnell reflector on an eq mount I used to have to fight with :-). Dan On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 2:33 AM, Canopus56 <canopus56@yahoo.com> wrote:
Although I did not expect to be able to see the Pleiades just a few minutes after civil sunset, at 6:00pm I put a small 60mm refractor on the Moon and was rewarded with a nice view of a shadow ray in Clavius on the Moon and 5 Pleiadan stars shining from a steel blue-grey sky. Taygetae 19 Tau, Mai 20 Tau, Electra 17 Tau, a fainter Celaneo 16 Tau and the Moon were visible in a 1.2 deg TFOV. One field away, Alycone 25 Tau and Merope 23 Tau could be seen. At 6:03pm, Taygeta winked off during ingress behind the dark limb. Celaneo 20 was a lunar grazer that passed a few arc minutes below the south pole and terminator, but was never obscured. The sky color was quite pleasing and I think in the future I will look at the Moon under similar conditions instead of waiting for it to get dark.
By 6:15pm, Maia 20 Tau was just beginning its own lunar south pole graze. I packed it up for while.
At 6:55pm, I again set up the small refractor to watch egress of two Pleiaden stars on the bright limb. Mai 20 Tau was ending its wide-field graze-pass of the south pole.
At about 7:00pm, I took a break from the eyepiece, looked up and there was a great pass by the ISS at about -2 mags from the northwest to the south east at about 35 degs alt. (Checked and it shows up on the NASA ISS Sighting Calculator. I had not thought to check for ISS overflights tonight.)
A few minutes later, fainter 5.6v 18 Tau egressed on the bright limb. With 60mm of aperture, I did not see the moment of egress. It was overwhelmed by bright limb. About five minutes after egress it was sufficiently far (2 or 3 arcminutes) from the bright limb to be detected.
This was a rare nice observing day for me:
At 5am, I went out and took a look at Comet Lulin, a peak at Saturn and the "Y" shaped Struve 761-762 system around sigma Orion.
Around 11:30am, a quick peak for small prominences off the Sun's limb with the PST.
6pm - Moon and an occulted star ingress.
7pm - Satellite overpass and an occulted star egress. I decided to pass looking for Comet Kushida in Tau. The Moon was within 20 degrees and it did not seem to be worth the trouble, but I see Patrick got an image.
Overslept on the 1:22am Vandenberg launch. - Kurt
Some background reading:
Weaver, H.R. 1947. The Visibility of Stars without Optical Aid. (Visibility of stars near sunset.) http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1947PASP...59..232W
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