by Jamie Dillon
How about a mild parody of an observing report as a buildup for the weekend? Last night we had stars overhead for the first time in days, and the finders were still mounted on Felix from 13 May, the last decent night out, so we headed out to the backyard with a short campaign in mind.
The limiting magnitude overhead was somewhere around 4.0, but the seeing was amazing, and I don't mean in a good way. Jay had gone on about the seeing from Montebello on Wednesday, and this must have been a close cousin. Went to look at some of the doubles in Bootes, right. Xi and pi would no way split either at 210 nor 420x, and they're with fairly wide separations (away from charts here). Epsilon, ole Izar, showed some elongation but wouldn't split. This was with star collimation right on the money, using a 6m Radian in an 11" f/4.5 Celestron Dobs. Went and visited Cor Caroli and Mizar for the relief.
Images of the doubles were literally jumping around within the field, boiling to the point of moving around. Classic description of 2/5, poor seeing.
My main plan was simply to stare at M3 and M5 which even as ghosts of their usual spangly selves were still worth gazing at for long stretches.
Took and finally cleaned that Henry Coe dust off the objective of my 8x50 finder, and dusted off the focuser inside and out. Now this dude is hot to trot for Saturday frolics!