[Chaos-l] Observing at Jayme's house

[Jon Stewart-Taylor]

Hi all.  Three  of us (Mike Gallagher,  Robert Nielsen, and myself)  
accepted Jayme's invitation to observe at his house last night (June  
11th).  The weather was semifavorable, with clear and decently  
transparent skies, but Very Heavy Dewing.  My intention to Marathon  
the Virgo Cluster galaxies was done in by the dew, and the fact i'd  
forgotten to bring my anti-dew equipment.  The Telrad was useless and  
the finderscope nearly so: i had to keep all the caps on everything  
unless i was actually looking through it, and even then i had to wipe  
the eyepieces about once a minute.

Other than that, it was a very nice night.  There were very few bugs,  
which was very nice. The temperature remained comfortable, neither hot  
nor chilly, very nice.  The tourist traps were still observeable, and  
were very nice.  In the evening we had 3 planets, especially Saturn,  
which looked very nice.  There were a surprising number of meteors (no  
significant shower is active) including one of at least 1st magnitude  
which left a brief trail, very nice.

The best object of the night was probably the Trifid (M20) through  
Robert's 12", with the telextender in, which made the nebula  
ginourmous.  The dust lanes were prominent, stretching almost all the  
way across the field of view.  Very nice.  The globular clusters  
(tourist traps M3, 4, 5, 13, 15, 22, 92, plus the "little ones") get  
an honorable mention.  With the clear steady skies supporting high  
magnifications, they were very nice.

Jayme and i stuck it out 'til the wee small hours waiting on Jupiter  
and the morning Comet McNaught.   Jupiter early on was so low that it  
really wan't much, but after an hour it sharpened up very nicely, and  
the missing belt was prominent in it's absence.  The comet was  
detectable in Jayme's binoculars, and easily seen in his refractor/ 
reflector tandem,  Very ni-, well, actually, it was a faint fuzzy.   
Hardly worth staying up for.  Not detectable unaided-eye, no visible  
tail or really any structure in the binoculars or scopes.  Jayme took  
some images, and the raws on the back-of-the-camera display showed a  
good deal more detail, so he may yet produce some (last time) very  
nice pictures of the comet.

J.
-- 
Jon Stewart-Taylor:  joncst at earthlink.net
Chapel Hill Astronomy: http://www.rtpnet.org/chaos