Dinosaur Point, 4 November 2007

Jay Reynolds Freeman


Except for being a docent at Lick and the Messier Marathon last March, I hadn't been to a dark-sky star party in a while: I have learned the hard way not to push myself in my hobbies when I am not feeling like it. But on November 4, 2007, I was feeling like doing some astronomy, so I packed my Vixen C-102f (102 mm f/9 fluorite refractor) and went to Dinosaur Point.

I was hoping to meet old friends and new, but I got there after dark and basically talked to nobody. Probably many of the folks who do know me won't believe I was there.

Conditions were pretty dry and not very cold. Seeing was a bit wobbly, but transparency seemed reasonable, and the light from the dam was a bother, but not a show-stopper. I rambled through some Messier objects and took a brief look at a small and wobbly Mars, that was nonetheless showing a good deal of shadowy detail.

Comet P/17 Holmes was a marvelous object. I am not into imaging and my sketching talent is nil, but at 77x I could see a short tail within the round but asymmetric coma, and perhaps a star-like nucleus (though that might have been a field star).

Something looked vaguely familiar about Comet Holmes, and I finally figured out what it was: The comet looked like a bright star seen through optics with piles of spherical aberration. When the Hubble Space Telescope was launched, everything looked that way ...

-- Jay Reynolds Freeman, Deep-Sky Weasel


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