by Bruce Jensen
Well - FINALLY. Wednesday 4/14 saw one of the darkest, clearest,
driest nights ever at San Antonio Valley. Stars were brilliant right
to the horizon in most directions, light domes were exceptionally
small, and there wasn't a trace of dew even by 1AM when I packed up. A
warm gentle easterly breeze wafted all evening. Coyotes sang and
frogs serenaded endlessly. I would have stayed longer, but for work
in the morning The only problem was the seeing - when it was
good, the sky showed myriad faint salt-and-pepper stars - but the vast
majority of the time it was extremely soft and ripply below about 75
degrees elevation. Even overhead the brighter objects failed to show
very much detail.
Mars looked awful all night and the big globular
clusters were underwater. For a guy working on low-elevation Corvus
(namely, me) it was a bit rough. It must have been the instability
effects of that upper level stream of thin cirrus that sailed in from
the NW all day and still seems to be lingering this morning.
In the
18" I managed to hit about 15.5 magnitude on galaxies, the faintest
surface brightness about 14.0 mag/min^2...I think this could have been
easily bettered with finer seeing. In the final analysis, though, I
made it through all but three of the Corvus galaxies shown in
Uranometria (and that was only for lack of time - I'll get 'em
Saturday) and easily saw a few that aren't charted directly. I also
managed to pick off a few new ones in Leo and Sextans.
Now this is more like it!