[Chaos-l] Farrington Session Sunday Night

[Jon Stewart-Taylorj]

Hi all.  Following up on what Mark South reported, the session at Farrington was fun for some, but not for all.  It turns out that there is a fire ant colony right at the edge of the west parking lot unpleasantly close to the place where we set up the scopes, and the youngest observer's feet were attacked.  That put a quick and unpleasant end to the evening for her family.  Everyone who uses the site, please be aware, and either use the east parking lot, or set up well away from the ants.  Visiting in daylight to figure out where the ants are is probably prudent.

This was the first time i'd seen Mark's new 15" Discovery dob.  An impressive scope, although the mirror box probably weighs as much as he does.  Conditions were pretty good for this early in the fall.  There were no clouds i could see, and the temperature was mild.  Unfortunately there was a lot of moisture in the air, which reduced the transparency by quite a bit and caused very heavy dewing.

Mark mentioned:

>  Jon's Scope:  [list]

The full list for the night:

Jupiter, Albireo, M13, Epsilon Lyrae (double-double), M57 (the Ring), M27 (the Dumbell),  Gamma Delphini,  M22, M31.  The transparency was sufficiently bad i couldn't see M32 or M110 while looking at M31.

I spent quite some time helping out with a 4.5" Tasco reflector.  As is typical of this sort of scope, aligning the finder was difficult.  We finally got it adjusted to the nearest degree or so, which wasn't quite enough to find M13. Or, maybe it was, but the mount wouldn't hold the scope steady enough to keep it pointed where the finder was aimed.  I eventually found M13 by sighting along the tube, then pushing the scope like a dob while i peered through the eyepiece.  Once i found it, it was actually a pretty good view.  4.5" reflectors of this sort usually have pretty decent optics.  But, the mount wouldn't hold the object in view.  I had to manually hold the scope in place so the owner (name withheld to protect the innocent) could get a look.  I strongly recommended a Telrad or Quickfinder to replace the 6x20 finder scope.  The mount might be salvageable with some shims and careful rebalancing.  

Still, it was a very nice night, especially when we arrived at 7, left at 10:30, and still got in 3 hours of observing.

J.