by Jamie Dillon
Old geography question - what do you call a person who lives in Flanders and speaks Flemish? A Fleming. We were surrounded by 'em Saturday night. Nice folks and interested in whatever we were looking at.
Myself, I had an atypical night and spent the larger chunk of time just sitting and watching the stars wheel by. An old favorite pastime and a riveting spectacle as it soaks in. Everitt and Neuschafer and I were set up in a group, and we spent a fair amount of time talking about life and changes, while watching the sky turn.
Jim had some big excitement, seeing his 8th and 9th planets. First view ever of Mercury. Then later in the night, Andy Pierce had gotten a fix on Pluto and didn't mind sharing. Someone else that night got 3C273, so it was a fine night for variety. I'd brought a finderchart for Ikeya-Zhang which sure turned out to be unnecessary. When Kevin came by all excited with the news, it was hard to miss in the head of Draco.
Did look around Corvus, starting with my first view of the Antennae. Turns out Leyland was looking at the same galaxies at the same time, so I'll include my observations for comparison. If you look back at Robert's report, 2002.05.04.12.html it's interesting to note how different these galaxies look in an 11" and an 18" (3x difference in light gathering).
This was with Felix, a Celestron 11" f/4.5 Dobs with a primary made by Discovery. Was using a 22 Pan, 16mm UO Koenig, 10mm and 6mm Radians, with a Lumicon OIII. The Antennae showed as 2 big diffuse blobs at 210x, with a clear E-W dark separating rim. In Everitt's 15 they started to show tails and were more distinct and separate in shape. I saw 4027 as a swirl with a bright core; 4024 was little, compact and fairly dim, by the same pretty pattern of stars that Robert and Jim noticed. 4033 was a star with a fuzzy halo. Also in Corvus, right in the middle of the kite, is 4361, that PN with bright central star, big bright nebula, no clear color (I'd logged the lack of color for later comparison, noticed that the Kiwi's 18 didn't see color either).
Off in SE Virgo is an interesting globular, NGC 5634. At 210x it showed a ragged edge, bright core, didn't resolve, so it really did look like a galaxy. Looked distant, and sure enough it's marked as 70 kly away. Much later we were comparing views of the Lagoon, the Swan and Trifid, the Ring in the 15. Summer promises. I got lost for the nth time in the Sagittarius Star Cloud, finally figured out with help from Wagner that that distinctive wrinkle in the NW of M24 is an OC on its own, 6603, resolving nicely at 126x with a pretty crease down the middle.
Ended up pulling out when the sky was lightening a bit, after showing Bruce Jensen something new to him (not an everyday occurence), my cluster of galaxies off W of M5, around 5846, from 3 weeks ago out of Mariposa. The sky got to 6.1 for me (6.6 for Everitt), seeing was 4/5, good. Am still pretty excited about seeing the Antennae firsthand.
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