Wednesday night, Virgo in backyard

by Jamie Dillon

With marine layer crowding in thru the end of this past week, it's a good thing I pulled Felix into the backyard on Wednesday night for some photon time. The whole weekend we've been sitting under thick stuff thru each night. Liam's birthday weekend, and a rare New Moon weekend when I couldn't get out to a hilltop.

There was some excitement Wednesday night, as it turned out. Transparency was OK, 5.0 limiting magnitude, but the seeing was very good, on the high side of 4/5. Jo came out and looked at Cor Caroli, Jupiter and M3. She really liked seeing clusters of stars pop out of the center of M3. I found M53 for the first time in the backyard.

Then I got the bit in my teeth. M64 and M65 looked real good, and I decided it was time to try again for Virgo galaxies. Up to that night, galaxies in the eyepiece at home had consisted of that Leo pair, the Whirlpool and Andromeda, that's it. Had gone into the middle of the Virgo cluster repeatedly and come up blank. This time, while scanning over from 6 Com (I almost always come in from the NW end), ran right onto M98 then sure enough onto M84 and M86. The third member of that equilateral triangle, 4388, was just at the edge of averted vision at 126x, but both pairs of eyes were right there to direct vision. No kidding. Sat there and ran down the length of Markarian's Chain. Yowww! Then looped over to the East and sa and stared at M88 that big fancy spiral.

The really decent seeing opened up a window from this in-town Salinas yard. Also, it looks as if my chops are continuing to develop. The old visual cortex is getting smarter.

For fun then, I plopped right into the middle of the Cluster and found some more wild galaxies. When I eventually came in very happy and told Jo what had gone on, her response was, "So, you got into the heart of Saturday night in downtown Virgo!" She's great.

Posted on sf-bay-tac Sun Mar 21 22:28:38 2004 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.0 Thu Jul 8 17:49:01 2004 PT