[Chaos-l] Dark Sky Observing

[Robert Nielsen]

Everyone,

While Jayme was at the MPSC observing session, John Miller, Steve 
Meister, Amy Sayle (and Amy's friend Steve) and I went to the dark 
sky site.   I was a wonderful night ... the sky was perfectly clear 
(until around 2 AM) but the seeing wasn't a great as I thought it 
would be ... making objects better under low magnification.   But the 
globular cluster and galaxy observing was exceptional.   I personally 
observered (with John's and Steve's help) over 10 globular clusters 
(my favorite) including M13, M3, M5, M4, and Omega Centauri all in 
the same night!   OK ... Omega Centauri was a bit iffy ... you could 
just barely see a smudge near the horizon ... but I'll count 
it.  Steve spent most of the night looking at galaxies with 4-digit 
NGC numbers, most wonderful in his truss Dobsonian scope.  And Amy 
and Steve spent the night seeing the sights through our scopes and 
finding them through binoculars, with Steve having an amazing ability 
to see satellites almost everywhere in the sky.   I think he found 
over a half dozen of them.

After the Moon set around midnight, the sky was full of deep-sky 
objects!   I pointed my scope at the Virgo cluster and could see 
multiple galaxies on almost every eyepiece view!   Move the scope 
left, I see three.  Move it right, I see five.   M51 (the Whirlpool 
Galaxy) was the best I've ever seen it, with the lanes visible and 
differences in brightness visible in each.   As it got later, the 
summer constellations started rising, so I spent time looking at 
Scorpius, Cygnus, and Lyra until an unexpected cloud bank moved in 
the from the west and we packed it up and left at 2:30 in the morning.

The Currins (owners of the property) came and visited us after 
midnight ... they had been at a wedding ... and I got Brenda to 
autograph her article in "Sky and Telescope".   It's really wonderful 
that they let us use their property ... even mowing the field for us 
to use.   It was definitely worth it last night ... perhaps the last 
good observing night for a few months to come.

Robert Nielsen

PS.  If Steve or John sees this, what was the NGC number of the long, 
thin galaxy we saw?   4204?