Observing report 4/14 Coe

by Matthew Marcus


The sky was incredibly mucky due to the haze at all levels. Ir was claimed that this was due to dust from dust-storms in Asia being blown our way by the jet stream. If so, that doesn't account for why there was so much of it at low levels.

There was a light turnout, including one woman who had just bought a Department Store Refractor . I managed to get the finder aligned and help her find Jupiter, Venus, Saturn and M42 before she had to go back to her campsite. I hope she continues on and doesn't get turned off by the crappy optics and wobbly mount.

Although the sky was murky and bright, the seeing was excellent. The first indication of this was that we were getting images of Jupiter and Saturn as good as we normally do when they're high overhead, despite the fact that we're losing them into the West. Peter Natscher was got a clean split of eta-Com (0.7") with his 10" Mak. Inspired by his example, I tried it with my venerable C8 and got it too. Each star was in the first Airy ring of the other, but there was real dark space in between. This led to the obvious idea of observing the brighter globs at 400x - Ohh, Ahh, Wow!

My trunk window dewed up almost immediately and papers got that wet feeling, but the Mark Wagner Special dew shield kept my C8 dry the whole time. This was the first severe test and it passed. The only trouble I had with it was that it got a bit crinkled and started biting into the light path. No problem, once I realized what was going on.

Although it seemed a pity to waste such seeing on galaxies, I made a little headway on my H400s and picked up about a dozen. No big rush. There are a couple of big, bright ones in Com and CVn I hadn't heard of before. I don't remember their numbers offhand, but I'll definitely have to go back to them. I'm starting to get into the two pages of Virgo, which opens up new navigational challenges, such as figuring out which of three galaxies in the field is the one on the list. In that region, the fact that you've hit a galaxy is no proof that you're where you think you are.

Mars was still low when I left. It was a sharply defined disk with no features except a faint white mark at the pole and maybe another on the limb. Maybe there's a dust storm there, too.

Normally, the moon, like the dawn, comes up like thunder. As I was leaving, I saw that it had come up like a faint 'pop!'. The murk layer dimmed it down to the point where it would have been comfortable to observe it through an unfiltered C8. By that time, I was rolling out the gate, satisfied with an observing session that was better than the daytime sky indicated.