I saw Tyler's Cone Nebula on the Astromart forums under astro-imaging and processing/deepsky. I liked his second post with the saturation levels turned down a bit. Rich, what mount is he using? I really like the results from the Takahashi Sky 90. I may have to buy one one of these days. It is also airline portable. I could take it to Hawaii. Debbie

From: Richard Tenney <retenney@yahoo.com> Date: 2005/03/07 Mon AM 07:41:31 MST To: Utah-Astronomy <utah-astronomy@mailman.xmission.com>, UVAA <uvaa@mailman.xmission.com> Subject: [Utah-astronomy] Observing report from Rush Valley (Saturday 5 March)

There were about a half-dozen of us that braved the cold Saturday night in Rush Valley ("Pit-n-pole") for fairly good skies (good enough, since any late Winter / early Spring opportunities are rare it seems) and good company.

It was a productive night for me -- I managed to observe 21 more objects on my Herschel-400 list, getting all of the open clusters in Canis Major and Monoceros, including the cone and rosette nebulas, 4 galaxies in Leo, and one in Cancer.

The "problem" with finding open clusters in Monoceros is like trying to find needles in a haystack -- most of it is rich milky-way starfields that make it difficult to tell where a cluster begins and where it ends. Thank goodness for setting circles! A couple of noteworthy clusters to look for are NGC 2506 in Monoceros, 2204 in Canis Major (looks like the constellation Perseus in miniature), and NGC 2360 in Canis Major, a real beauty in a very rich starfield that fills the eyepiece, visible even in my 9x60 finderscope.

One highlight of the evening was having Tyler Allred along with his Tak-90 and CCD camera imaging the cone nebula (NGC 2264); the result was impressive (I'm encouraging him to join the list and post that and some of his other very nice images in the gallery).

Dew/Frost pretty much shut us all down about 11:30. I suspect we will try again this coming Saturday, if the weather cooperates.

Rich

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