[Chaos-l] Jordan Lake observing 8/16/20

[Kumar Pandya]

I had an impromptu observing session at Jordan Lake last night.  It has been a while since I have had a chance to observe.  My observing buddy John H. from Cary met up with me at Farrington point around 9.30 pm.  I had bought my Vixen BT-80 Binocular Telescope and John had 25x100 binoculars, 15x70 binoculars and 130mm reflector.  
The night was fine indeed.  This was my first view of MW from Jordan lake this season.  It was quite obvious from Sag through scutum star cloud and the rift in Cygnus.  I feasted on the two open clusters in Scorpio (perhaps my last of the season?  I hope to view them at least once more), the usual globs and open clusters in Sag, and the scutum star cloud.  M11 was as good as expected with the members almost resolving at 30x through the BT80s.  I found these instruments to deliver fine contrast and the different nebulas were very easy to see (and appreciate) – trifid, lagoon, swan, dumbbell.  One of the highlights of the evening was to look at the same objects and compare them though the three different instruments.  The 130 F5 reflector went the deepest, the 25X100s  gave wide views and bt80s provided nice contrast.  John tracked down several globs, nebs and OC with the reflector.  
I had the time only for an hour’s session, but before long I had spent two!  Reluctantly I packed up since I had an early morning at work today.   I look forward to another session at J lake soon.  I have never visited any of the other CHAOS haunts – Pettigrew, Medoc, or Staunton.  I have signed up for the Staunton river star party in October.  I would like to check out Medoc in September.  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://rtpnet.org/pipermail/chaos-l/attachments/20120817/939e220a/attachment.html>