[Chaos-l] farrington Mon. night

[Jon Stewart-Taylor]

Hi all.  The skyclock was correct again.  I was running late, and  
didn't get down there until after 9:00. When i arrived i could see  
the predicted  band of clouds retreating southwards and leave the sky  
beautifully clear.  It was quite a good night, especially given the  
thick clouds 1/2 hour earlier.

The wind was pretty strong, at times strong enough to shake the  
'scope, so i didn't spend much time on Saturn or other objects  
requiring good seeing.  I did go looking for the planetary nebula in  
(or, rather, in front of)  M46, which i'm ashamed to admit i'd never  
noticed when i'd looked at that cluster in the past.  I did find it  
tonight, but it wasn't as obvious as the lovely picture posted last  
week made it seem like it should be.  It was barely detectable at  
45X: took some serious averted imagination to decide it was really  
there.  At 67X it was plain, but not very clear.  90X gave about the  
best view of the planetary.  Given the amount of light pollution at  
the site, i tried my rarely-used Orion wide-band LPR filter.  It did  
increase the contrast between the planetary and the background sky.   
It made the nebula more visible at 67X, but i couldn't really tell  
much difference at 90X.  Seeing wasn't really steady enough for  
higher powers.

After looking at M6 and M47, i went hunting for an NGC planetary a  
few degrees to the south.  I eventually did find it, but it was much  
smaller than the other.  I really couldn't be sure i'd found it at  
45X, but it was clearly non-stellar at 67X.  At 90X it got bigger  
(duh) but didn't really show much more definition or detail.  Not  
going on my list of tourist traps.

Both nebulae showed the importance of trying different magnifications  
as you look at an object.  While too much magnification is one of the  
boogy men we learn about early in our amateur astronomy careers, it  
sometimes makes us overcompensate be reluctant to use higher  
magnifications when they might give an imporoved view.  For these two  
objects, increasing the magnification made he difference between  
detecting and observing.

Nest i visited the Leo triplet of galaxies (detectable, but all three  
a bit washed out.  M51 was in much the same condition.  It was clear  
there were two non-stellar objects side-by-side, one much larger.   
However, even after 10-15 minutes observing, i couldn't see the  
spiral which appears to connect the larger galaxy to the smaller.

I was about to pack it up, when i noticed Crater had risen over the  
treeline.  Since it's got one of my favorite galaxy  (104, the  
Sombrero) and asterism pairs, i tracked it down.  Again, the galaxy  
was a bit washed out by the ambient  light pollution.

After that i packed up and came home.  The joy of having a "fairly"  
sight:  left the house at 9, started take-down at 11:00, but still  
got in an hour and a half of observing, -and- got home well before  
midnight.

Good luck everybody going tomorrow.  I'll probably be working late so  
i can go to the 3:00 event at Morehead on Wednesday.

J.

PS: What's a "fairly" site?  It;s fairly close, and fairly dark.

J.
-- 
Jon Stewart-Taylor
joncst at earthlink.net



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://rtpnet.org/pipermail/chaos-l/attachments/20090330/fe76da77/attachment-0001.htm>