Montebello

by Phil Chambers


I was up to Montebello last night stealing photons and delivering Walmart cases.

There were times in the evening that we could see lots of detail on Jupiter. There were also times when you could see a big fuzzy. The seeing was variable and it seemed to be over the course of a half hour or so. We would just get into an ep comparison exercize and the seeing would deteriorate for no observable reason.

However, through a 7in Intes Mak Newt and through Paul S's 6inch AP there was lots of detail available. The Red spot, north and south equitorial bands, the thin equitorial band and a couple of others were clearly visable. The shadow from a transit (IO ??) was sharply defined. Later as the shadow left the planet, the moon became very obvious before it moved from in front of the planet. It was very interesting to watch it emerge.

The only 2 scts up there were a 10 LX200 that was very busy fighting dew and ccding fuzzies with an ST237 and the "bargin basement" 8 inch that James Turley had.

The 8 inch was giving OK views after a round of collimation but it is obvious that someone has rotated the corrector and/or the secondary about 15 - 25 degrees. That will mess up an SCTs performance. We intend to give it a try later by working on it but you cant judge based on that scopes performance (yet ;-)

If you are viewing in town, chances are you are looking over someones house. This will mess up planetary viewing - big time - as the heat rising off the houses are death to seeing detail.

There might be a few of us going to Coe or Pacheco this weekend. You should come out and bring the 80 and take a look. The double cluster and m31 for a couple of things, will be great in it.

For my part, I mooched views. It was really nice up there and when it was time to go, I put the chair in the car and left... neat...

Paul S. and I compared the performance of his 5mm radian vs my 5mm Vixen Lanth and the Radian was the obvious winner. This was a contrast and detail comparison as there is no contest on fov. It was interesting to me that there would be such an obvious difference. The lanth did cost 1/3 the price of the radian, however.

It was very wet. I left my 12x60s on a mount for a few minutes and not only were they dewed over, there was water dripping from the body. James had a Kendrick dew strip on his C8 (on high) and still had to use his 12v hair dryer every few minutes. (he didnt have a dew shield for it -yet-)

The Mak dewed over a couple of times but Pauls refractor didnt seem to until the very end. Any book left out was sopping wet. Eps would fog just because you got close to them. It was inside pocket time for eps.

We got some good views of M42 (its always good) but the best we could do was 5 stars and the 5th was winking in and out.

But, it was a nice night, great company, lots of different activities going on, not much serious observing (except for the ccd'er). A very nice start to the holiday weekend.

And besides, outrunning the firebird on the way up was fun (dont try this at home, the road was very slippery). He pulled into the lot and made a uturn, saw all the people and left. Sorry for his headlights, guys :-)