IHOP 5-28 - Jake's recap

by Jake Burkart

We had a nice night at IHOP. Shneor, Randy, Gene, Michael Damer and I made up the group. I was there primarily to assist Michael in setting up his new Celestron 11 Advanced GT scope. This scope is mounted on Celestron’s CG-5 German EQ mount with go to capability. I don’t have much experience with EQ mounts so we had to fumble around a bit before we got everything tightened and the mount roughly polar aligned. Once we had a good polar alignment, and did the three-star alignment, the go to functionality was landing objects within the 40mm plossl field of view.

While helping Michael with his scope I was able to find Omega Centauri with my 10x50 binoculars about 3° above the southern horizon. This was my first time seeing Omega Centauri. It was huge. I pointed my 11” that way and could tell the cluster was large and dispersed, but couldn’t really resolve any stars. Shneor called me over to his scope a minute later to have a look at the Omega cluster. In his large dob the cluster had a fine grainy texture. It was surprisingly steady for being as low in the horizon as it was. Overall it was a beautiful site to behold and I’m grateful for having the opportunity to see such an awesome cluster with some real aperture.

I looked at M84 and M86 and slewed around to some other galaxies in Markarian’s chain. They looked nice in my 11”. I looked at the Hercules cluster, the Ring Nebula, and later in Shneor’s scope, the dumbbell, veil, and some hamburger galaxies. Of those my favorite view was of the Veil nebula using bino-viewers and an OIII filter (I think). The detail was amazing. I also got a nice peek of M22 in Randy’s scope. Thanks for the great views guys!

The seeing was poor at twilight, but improved as the night went on. It was overall better than I expected (from looking at the Clear Sky Clocks). The temperature was tolerable, probably in the mid 40’s? I had lots of fun.

Posted on tac-sac May 29, 2005 16:42:37 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Sep 20, 2005 13:58:55 PT