by Jamie Dillon
Another one-object night:
Saturday night was the night for 7790 in Cassiopeia, a pretty open cluster off Caph (the foot), beta Cas, the star at the western end of the W. When I pulled into the lot at Coe around 8:20 Saturday night, I set up next to my buddy Nilesh Shah. After setting up my gear, I peeked thru his scope and he was looking at 7790 and 7788, a smaller neighbor in the same one-degree field. Here I jumped a hair, as I thought I'd caught all the NGC clusters in Cassiopeia out of SkyAtlas, and here was the one I'd missed. This was while Richard Ozer, many miles away, was studying the same object. Mark Wagner turns out to have looked at 7790 earlier the same night. Totally Kismet.
So with bright stars overhead to the North and East, and stuff moving in from the West, I swung over to study that field. 7790 showed as dense, looking fairly distant, with an irregular shape and a pile of faint stars at its center. 7788 is pretty teeny, not in SkyAtlas, but nested in the middle of a spangle of bright foreground stars. At 79x, with a 45' field, the view was just lovely. I even got in a sketch.
The other astro wonder of the night was the view of Saturn thru Bob Cz's new StarMaster, a twin of Jeff Blanchard's scope. Saw the A-ring, all muted on the inner edge. The Encke minimum was sharp. Never seen 4 rings before in a scope. The planet itself was gorgeous, with all kinds of brown and tan variations across its disk.
Before long in Felix, Nilesh and I stared at Jupiter at 210x, complete with 4 moons and a big knot cruising along in the SEB. Believe this is what Rich Neuschafer had said was a big barge.
(Felix is a Celestron 11" f/4.5 Dobs with a primary made by Discovery. Was using a 22 Pan, 16mm UO Koenig, & 6mm Radian.)
Not long after this, epic fog came over the hill in waves. By 11 we were in dense ground fog. There had been a sizable crowd there, at least 12 scopes, faces new and old. It hit me as I crawled down the hill after 1 AM that this was good fun, like it always is, no matter what the conditions. Plus I got my one new object for the night and now own the NGC's in Cassiopeia within SkyAtlas, except for a couple of diffuse nebulae that I at this point know nothing about. World without end.