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 __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
Quoting Richard Tenney <retenney@yahoo.com>:
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!
Rich, That's what I like about smaller scopes. The view is not nearly as cluttered. They are also not as bright to look through. I accidentally looked at the Milky Way one night through Daniels 17.5 scope. It was like looking at the sun, no matter where I looked for the rest of the night, all I seen was stars. Completely ruined my night vision. Had to close my eyes for a half hour so I could see to drive home... ;)
Ok, I admit it. I don't like freezing so I stayed closer to home Saturday night and went to SPOC. Although the eyepiece test that had been scheduled for Saturday was canceled so Bruce could do some work on the Big Scope a few folks showed up anyway. I'm really getting spoiled by the scope. Saturn (no surprise here) looked great but the thing that blew me away was the view of M-82. The dark dust lanes were beautiful. And I could have sworn I saw a hint of color. But if that was not good enough, I heard from someone who went back about 4:30 am who reported: "...I looked for the central star in the ring nebula. At 180x the center of the nebula is so bright that I couldn't see it, but using 310x it was easy with averted vision, but tough to see straight on. ~500x brought it out without averted vision." He added that M-13 at 180x was "absolutely breathtaking". Drool... Patrick
participants (3)
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diveboss＠xmission.com -
Patrick Wiggins -
Richard Tenney