by Jamie Dillon
Wouldn't want you to think I've been sitting on my observing hands since last Saturday week at LSA. Rolled down to Gonzales one night last week for sidewalk astro there at the high school, just in time for dense overcast, within 15 minutes of arrival. Sunday night I set up at home, looking up at Cygnus, just at sunset. Collimated, set up the finders, then just after sunset groundfog rolled in and stayed.
On the current wishlist there are two objects left in Cygnus, a littlish OC, 6866, and the Blinking PN, 6826, so there's this extra hunger to catch the Swan up sometime before too long.
Last Thursday night however, there was a combination of mediocre transparency, ca 4.2 limiting mag, with intermittently really good seeing, 4/5. M35 and 7789 lacked their usual dazzle. But Saturn was great, with brown splotches across the disk, Encke's minimum showning off and on. Two little moons were peeking just off the edge of the disk to the South, and the view held up for a while at 420x. Checking the chart in S&T, could have been any two of the four inner moons, they were all clustered right there at the time.
Must say I felt grownup figuring which of Saturn's moons were in view. 4 years or so from now they're gonna move out of the land of mystery, when Cassini swings out there. I'd been a big Galileo orbiter fan and knew a fair amount about Jupiter's 4 big moons by the time I first caught them in binocs out the back here. Here it'll be in reverse.
Caught 6 stars in the Trapezium with averted vision. Decided that M42 was just going to take a lifetime of continual study. It hit me that I was staring at vast intricate halls, billions of kilometers across.
Then Tuesday night we had another open window of actual sky, with mag ca 4.8 and mediocre seeing 3/5 > 2/5. Four moons were lined up in a lovely arc just west of Saturn. This time from the chart it had to be Tethys, Dione and Rhea marching in a row pointing to Titan. This was with Felix, a Celestron 11" f/4.5 Dobs with a primary made by Discovery. Was using a 25 Celestron SMA, 16mm UO Koenig, a 6mm Radian and a TV 2x Barlow.
Our Christmas break, Marsha, starts for all 3 of us on the evening of the 15th. You might well believe I'll be hitting the high spots. See you there.