by Bruce Jensen
Phil Chambers wrote:
The high thin stuff seemed to move off to the east around 6:30 or so. When I got there Bruce was already set up with his 18" Starmaster. It turns out we were the only ones there for the evening (except for the frogs and occasional Coyote)
Yeah! Where were youse guys anyway?
The sky looked pretty good for the evening but the > seeing had a high frequency ripple that allowed no detail on Saturn and Jupiter.
It also had a pretty severe blurring effect on the M42 Trapezium, where the E and F stars were only intermittently visible. The effect was the visual equivalent of the noise made by frying food in a deep fat fryer, sort of an atmospheric *sizzling*.
Bruce showed me some nice views of Thors Helmet, the Fornax Galaxy cluster and several other obscure galaxies.
We gotta get you out more, Phil - M81, M82 and NGC 2903 aren't really *that* obscure! ;-) We got a fair view of NGC 1365, that gorgeous barred spiral in the Fornax cluster, even low on the horizon and in some high clouds - the bar across the center was visible, with a *faint hint* of the spiral arms that make it so darn photogenic.
The sky was a bit bright, but some objects that showed better than expected were the Flame Nebula (nice internal dark lane detail at 290x, which high power also helps to exclude the brilliant glimmer of Zeta Orionis), Minkowski 1-7 (a little bitty planetary in Gemini that shows up with O-III blinking), and (as the title suggests) the Medusa Nebula, a large planetary nearby also in Gemini, visible only faintly with the O-III filter.
M33 was lovely as usual, although the high-frequency buzz of the atmospheric beehive kept the finer details at bay.
It was a nice relaxing evening after so many cloudy nights.
Hear, hear! What a blessing after the less-than-choice nights we've been having recently! And the company could not have been better - very pleasant and interesting :-)
By the way, Richard N., the slightly modified mirror cell worked beautifully, centering the mirror dead on and allowing quick and painless bullseye collimation. All the manufacturer did was modify the lateral support whiffle tree pads (the pads upon which the side of the mirror rests) to "lift" the mirror a bit, and in the process added an additional vibration-damping polyolefin material. He did nice work :-)
Finally, that glow to the west appeared, as far as I can tell, to be maniacal, er, I mean, zodiacal light. It did not have the typical dome-shaped glow of a light or cluster of lights; rather, it was more of a vertical rounded shaft of light that was narrow at the base and elongated skyward, in the classic form of the ZL. It also was brightest shortly after twilight ended and diminished by the time we left. If one goes up to the west of the Montebello site, one also finds primarily state/county park lands and ranchlands; unless someone has built a pretty substantial compound out thataway, I don't think we'd see a light shaft of that size in that location. If it was zodiacal light, we can expect to see the light shaft grow as spring progresses.