[Chaos-l] Observing in VA tonight

[Mark Montazer]

I agree with both Michael and Jayme, the skies were outstanding. In my
admittedly limited experience, I have never seen the Milky Way so full
and rich. It was truly breathtaking and I spent quite a few minutes
just naked eye observing. I snapped one decent shot with an 18mm lens.
The light pollution is greatly exaggerated due to it being a 30s
exposure at ISO 1600. The Milky Way in the pic is representative of
what we saw once we had full night-vision.

http://astrobin.com/12926

We had a good crowd at the beginning. Lots of enthusiastic kids. I
managed to get a decent view of Mars and tried to point out some of
the just-barely-visible features. The adults were just as
enthusiastic.

I will agree again with Michael and confirm that the view of the Veil
Nebula was outstanding. I was quite impressed.

As usual I had my camera attached to my scope for a bit and managed to
get some decent shots of the Lagoon Nebula. After stacking and
processing, it actually turned out much better than I anticipated.
Note that because of the IR-cut filter that's on my camera, most of
the red from M8 was lost (and it is mostly red.) That being said I
managed to restore some color to it.

http://astrobin.com/12923/

I've got some shots of the Dumbbell Nebula, but need to attempt to
reprocess it. My first attempt wasn't that great.

Cheers,
Mark




On Sat, Jun 16, 2012 at 11:41 AM, Michael Hrivnak <mhrivnak at hrivnak.org> wrote:
> 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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