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St. Patrick’s Day
- March 17, 2007 Equipment: CDS: AstroTech 80ED with EQ-3 & clock
drive (more on this pleasantry below) Conditions: Mostly clear skies, some wisps of clouds observed at dawn, very little wind, upper atmospheric turbulence, but light to no wind, no bugs, relatively warm for March (heavy coats not until 4 AM) Objects observed (in rough order) So we turned our sites to Canis Major: On to Gemini: We compared Don’s 10mm Radian to my 9mm BO/TMB and didn’t really find any differences on Saturn. Both images were very nice. The Beehive, M44 in refractor was nice. NGC 2903 in Leo was somewhat disappointing, but there it was. in Orion We got M1 in Taurus. M101 – oh my God! The spiral arms never seen so well! Curt’s imaging gave us a LOT of detail to investigate in the galaxy and with Don’s 12.5” dob, we were able to pick up a lot of the details in the eyepiece. Curt also caught nearby galaxies oval-ish NGC 5473 & faint NGC 5474. We all observed these visually as well through Don’s great dob with a bit of panning. We took this opportunity to compare eyepieces. Don’s 30mm Antares framed things nicely, but I tried my SuperView 30 and found I the TFOV to be wider and better corrected. Curt tried an older Nagler 16mm, but the magnification was too much and all the details disappeared. The best view was through my trusty old TeleVue 20mm Plossl. This eyepiece produced a FANTASTIC image that spoke for itself. The TeleVue Plossls are worth every penny, especially the 15 & 20mm models, and one can pick them up used off CloudyNights or AstroMart for a song (that’s how I got this 20mm, btw). M51, the Whirlpool, and companion NGC 5195 revealed their spiraling glory in majestic detail. M81/82 & NGC 3077 were spectacular. We could see the bar in M82 clearly in Don’s big dob, which Curt’s imaging had turned Don and I on to. Then it was off to Leo. The Triplet NGC 3628, M65 & M66 were fantastic. I went through all the galaxies in the base of Leo with my trusty Sky & Telescope Pocket Sky Atlas, picking up NGC 3593, M95 & 96, NGC 3412, 3377 and 3367. But I was baffled by M105 & NGC 3384, cause I saw one more in Don’s dob that S&T didn’t tell me about. I was certain another, fainter galaxy lie in the same region and later found that NGC 3389 does indeed create an additional ‘triplet’ in Leo, less distinct than the main one, but there just the same. I was a celestial Magellan. I found one thing for sure in all these observations. I really prefer alt-alzimuth mounts over equatorials for astronomical outings. EQ mounts serve a purpose for educational missions, when lots of people are lining up to catch a glimpse at a moving target. They’re also good for studying one object in detail. Perhaps it’s a gibbous moon out and one wants to spend a lot of time on Saturn. That’s when they’re nice. But when you’re at a dark sky site mining for celestial gold, they’re a PAIN in the derrière, c’est vrai! We were still able to pick up the Auriga trilogy M37, M36 & M38 with NGC 1907 before they set in the west, so we did one final review of the setting Winter panoply. I found some star cluster descending betwixt a patch of open sky bounded by two walls of Caprock Canyon. Not sure what it was. Could have been M48, M46 or M50, but it was nice. M13 in the big dob was fantastic, reminding me of a Rastafani, wild dreadlocks spread all about in every direction, blowing in the celestial breeze. We observed M83, the Seashell Galaxy and M104, the Sombrero. The dust lane was quite pronounced in the big dob. M4, M80 and of course, no night would be complete without M57. The Ring Nebula was fantastic in the dob. We didn’t catch the faint central star, but we did see the faint edge stars bounding its top and bottom. Very nice rings, however. It was late and we put on our heavy winter coats as the Summer celestial sites came into view. In Sagittarius, M28, NGC 6638, M22, NGC 6642, 6528, 6522, 6540, 6553, 6544, M8 (the Lagoon!), M20 (Trifid), M21 and M17 (Swan) all dazzled in the crisp air. The sun was coming up. But since the brightness wouldn’t hamper Jupiter, we moved onto Jove in Scorpius and caught a nice look at the King of the Heavens. What a nice view, and a fitting ending to what was the most remarkable and enjoyable astronomical experience of my life.
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