[Chaos-l] Observing Report

[Robert Nielsen]

On Saturday night, three of us CHAOS members (plus one) went to the 
dark sky site for our monthly observing session.   Mark South and 
Kara, Greg Dillon, and Robert Nielsen attended, although Robert 
showed up too late to actually see the occultation of the Pleiades by 
the Moon.    There were some widely scattered thin clouds at the 
beginning of the evening, which disappeared around 10 PM.

Mark was working on getting his telescope under computer control and 
seems to have succeeded, showing people the Christmas Tree Cluster 
and views of Jupiter and other sights.   Greg had some fun using a 
new video camera on his "beast" ... coming up with some pretty decent 
pictures of the Sombrero Galaxy (M104).    Later, Greg introduced us 
to Comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann, and we all tried to find it using 
RA and Dec figures from his drive.

I spent the night investigating Coma Berenices and looking at 
globular clusters in particular.   Saturday night, you could see M3, 
M5 and M13 (the Great Hercules Cluster) all at the same time.  In 
Coma, there was a really interesting and fine edge-on galaxy, NGC4565 
which I had never seen before.   That, along with Greg looking at the 
Virgo galaxy cluster, urged me on to look at other more well-known 
Messier galaxies ... and objects such as M51 and M64 as well as the 
aforementioned Sombrero actually looked better than I had ever seen 
them before through my scope.

Mark left earlier, and Greg and I gave up around 12:30 AM.  The skies 
were nice and stable ... although the contrast was not as good as 
it's been at the site.   Perhaps this was due to high clouds or 
moisture in the air or something.   The fact that Saturn was nice and 
steady makes me think this was true.

The one bad thing about Saturday was that we showed up *unannounced * 
at the site ... I had forgotten to call the folks who live 
there!  Next time, one of us that is planning on going needs to call ...

Robert Nielsen