[Chaos-l] Observing in VA tonight

[Michael Hrivnak]

Last night was one of those nights that makes the whole hobby worth
it.  It was very dark, cloud-free, and mostly quite dry.

We had a number of enthusiastic campers come by more than once to see
the highlights, and I think we had 5 or 6 scopes going.

Staunton River SP was extremely impressive for its dark sky last
night.  The Milk Way itself looked unbelievably good.  There was so
much detail, it looked like a photograph.

The highlight for me was probably the Veil around 1:45am.  There was
incredible detail to be seen in all three sections.  Also the Dumbell
looked as good as I've ever seen it.  Without a filter, you could see
the entire structure including the hour-glass plus the ellipse around
it without even trying.  No averted vision- it was bright.  Adding a
UHC filter just made the whole thing pop and brought out some inner
detail.

I logged 20 Messier objects during the session, and all night,
everything looked bright and crisp.  It was especially nice to enjoy
the great southern horizon there and take advantage of everything
around Sagittarius.  The dimmer globular clusters (at least the ones
on the Messier list) in Sagittarius looked their best, and I could
resolve lots of start in almost all of them.

If I didn't have so much to do this weekend, I would have stayed all
night.  My only complaint was that the 24-hour Sheetz in South Boston
was closed on the way home!

Looking forward to doing it again in July,
Michael

On Fri, Jun 15, 2012 at 12:56 PM, Michael Hrivnak <mhrivnak at hrivnak.org> wrote:
> Looks very promising.  It will be chilly for mid-June (low of 54F), so
> bring a jacket.
>
> Michael
>
> On Fri, Jun 15, 2012 at 12:53 PM, Jayme Hanzak <jhanzak at unctv.org> wrote:
>> I looks like it may be good tonight. I'll be at the park around 7pm. At
>> least that is the time I'm shooting for.
>>
>> Last night was great at my house. No light dome from Durham. Hopefully
>> tonight might be the same in VA
>>
>> with no light dome from South Boston. :-)
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Jayme
>>
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