[Chaos-l] Observing report from Farrington, 8/24

[Jon Stewart-Taylor]

Hi all. I was at Farrington Point a bit longer than i'd planned, so i  
guess it was a pretty good night.  As i'd left my glasses at home, i  
couldn't do a limiting magnitude guestimate, but even without them the  
Milky Way was plainly visible from Cygnus down to about 40 degrees  
above the horizon.  I was there from about 9:15 'till nearly midnight,  
and worked my way through most of the deep-sky objects on pages 6, 7,  
and 8 of BSA2000.  Most significant to me, i managed to find the  
Saturn and Helix nebulae for the first time.

   The Saturn nebula was actually pretty easy to find, since it's both  
bright and fairly large.  Higher magnifications brought out the oblate  
shape, though i didn't really see the "ansae" (whiskers out the sides  
which look a little like Saturn's rings edge-on, hence the "Saturn  
nebula" name).

The Helix was easy to find, but Very Hard to See.  By that i mean that  
with the 8x50 finder, star hopping to the location of the nebula was  
straightforward.  Actually seeing the object once i was there was  
another matter.  In fact, if i hadn't used the Orion broadband LPR  
filter, i probably wouldn't have been able to see the nebula at all.   
Even with the filter it was just a big, sorta round, green, faint  
enhancement of the background.  As is often the case with faint  
objects, tapping the tube to make the view wiggle a little helped  
detect the nebula.  Once i'd found it with the filter, i could detect  
it  by tapping even without the filter, but i probably wouldn't have  
seen it if i didn't already know where and how big it was.  With the  
filter i could detect it without tapping.

I finished off by going to mu Cep and the nifty triple star a degree  
north of it.  All in all a pretty good night.

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