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by Jamie Dillon
I'd promised at least one person to file a report of Saturday the 9th at Pacheco. This is the fun part to go with the collimation travail story sent earlier this evening.
The Big Deal that night was a Great Leap Forward in magnitude and hopping. Spent a chunk of the night finding and taking in 7448 and 7479, two galaxies in the vicinity of alpha Pegasi, Markab. They're at 11.7 and 11 respectively, which is about a mag and a half past where I'd been before. Didn't get there without help. The way Doug Davis helped me out was leading with his souped-up Coulter. I'd look where his finder was heading and work out my own salvation on Felix.
Mind you, this was after the collimation ills were fixed. 7448 showed its spiral but not any other detail to my eye. 7479 showed arms and dust lanes, by contrast. Burnham's has a splashy photo of 7479.
Made progress learning to make good use of SkyAtlas. I'd been using Edmund's Mag 6, very cool atlas with naked eye stars only plotted - just right for me until recently. Here I was Saturday realizing that the grouping of three 8.0-8.5 stars in the finder just SE of Markab sure enough showed right there on the chart.
It was just a great night, clear, rife with possibility. Company was great. I was so looking forward to a night with the troops. Not that the eyepiece wasn't fine company as well.
Other thresholds included my first view ever of the Crab, which showed all kinds of structure. At the same time, Refractor Rich was showing off a flat spectacular view of Saturn. Cats were nudging each other to take turns. Breathtaking.
Went to M35 for the first time since last winter, when it was one of my first deep sky objects. Dunno about you, but I can forget how beautiful something is. And here I found its 4x more distant companion this time, 2508.
Last time M41 was in the sky, I hadn't gotten to finding objects that weren't real obvious in the finder. And here it jumped right out. Gaudy too. Rich took a moment here to make sure I found the Rosette in its sinuous glory.
Then toward dessert time, after bathing the eyes in M42 for a while, Ursa Major had swung back up. Jeff Blanchard and I were the only ones still up. Looked at M81 and M82 and discovered a galaxy! This in the sense of spotting something in the sky first. Was 3077, an elliptical in the same gravitational group as its two famous neighbors.
Pacheco sure enough rules in good weather. This was with Felix the 11" Celestron Dobs, with a 7x50 finder, 26mm SMA, 17 and 7.5 Celestron Plossls, a 10m Orion Plossl and a TeleVue 2x Barlow.