Coyote Lake 20 Feb 2006

by Sean McCauliff

Matthew Marcus, Rob Hawley, Robert Armstrong, Charlie Wicks (?) and another person who's name I've forgotten (sorry) where out in the cold parking lot of Coyote Lake this past Monday night. My only plan was to just browse the sky. I checked out Saturn and M42 while I was waiting forthings to get dark. When it did I took my time finding the Eskimo Nebula, stopping at a couple of double stars on the way. The Eskimo showed some details. There was apoorly defined black ring separating the parka from the face. I thought I could see some bright circles at timeswithin the face. After months of clouds the first deep sky object had been found. Then the transparency went down hill.

I stopped by M67 in Cancer for awhile and stared at it for awhile at medium power. Then I went for NGC 3115 in Sextans. There were some false starts as the wrong star was chosen for Gamma Sex. It was quite pleasing bright edge on with a well defined core. This was cool because I was not able to find this galaxy last year when I first got the Plettstone.

As Leo rose I checked out some of the Messier galaxies in Leo; later M108 and the Owl in the same field. Moving in on the owl I could see some darker voids that looked like they could have been the eyes. M51 showed some spiral structure. Ii was nice tosee a clear face on spiral again.

During the night Saturn was observed a bunch of times at 200-330x. Someone onTAC had posted their photo of Saturn's storm and I wanted to try and observe it. A couple of clouds bands/areas were visible and I stared at them for some minutes, but to no avail. Green and yellow-green filters did not help. Robert's 20in obsession did not show any additional detail.

When I looked at M100 in Matthew's scope I could barely detect M100, so no time was spent going for the supernova there.

Some other objects observed: M108, M3, theghost of jupiter, a faint peanut and a barely visible face on spiral.

Good times where had by all.

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Posted on sf-bay-tac Feb 21, 2006 21:22:00 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Mar 01, 2006 23:42:56 PT