by Richard Crisp
A little news from Sunday at MB seems in order.
Turley, Sterngold, Santangeli, Denny W, and Dirk from PAS were all there along with me. It was noteworthy that everyone was using a Celestron SCT. They ranged from 8" to 14".
Everyone was imaging except for the image king, Mr. Turley, of Sky Image Labs (hey someone has to package and ship out this stuff).And in fact, his supplier of packaged units, Denny was there to represent the back end of the process. So here we had the front end capture folks, the back end manufacturing guy and the outlet to the customer all up there last night. I've never seen such a focus (no pun intended) at MB in the past.
The weather was cold (mid 30s) and dry (mid forties RH).
The evening started out with a bang when Dirk whipped out the RA and Decl of the comet. I wish I knew which comet it was, but it was located at RA 01 07 Dec +02 54. Pete Santangeli shot a nice image of it and I joined the fray as you see from above. But before imaging it, I took a good luck at it through my C14 with a 35MM Panoptic. What a wonderful view. No question there was a multi streamed tail. Really cool. I like comets.
Conditions wise, there was no wind to note and the skies were reasonably steady and had good transparency at least to the south. The northern light dome was pretty severe and got in the way of JT's mini-Messier survey.
I felt lucky to get two decent images and especially lucky in that I got a comet for the first time. Their ephemeral nature makes them seem very special to me. They are like a cosmic vagabond passing through town, bringing joy not unlike the way a circus/midway would brighten the smiles of youngsters in the small towns along their path.
La Luna came up near midnight and Paul Sterngold and I were the last to leave just a tad before 1am.