| Observer | Dave Staples, Wife, Mom, Dad, Niece, Nephew |
|---|---|
| Date | 17 April 2001 |
| Time | 2030-2230 PDT |
| Location | Santa Rosa, Ca 38°16'N 122°40'W |
| Weather | Warm beautiful shirt sleeve weather |
| Equip | Eyeballs MK1, C8, 40mm, 32mm plossls, 2x barlow |
| Seeing | 9/10 |
| Trans. | 7/10 |
Sorry in advance for the long windedness.
Mom and Dad rolled into town last night (they are long haul truck drivers, go figure) for a rare visit with the grandbaby. So after the munchkin went to sleep, (along with her niece who came over to play) I set up the scope. As far as seeing went it was one of the best nights that I have had in my backyard. Transparency I'm still trying to get a handle on. The light dome of Santa Rosa seemed to climb a bit higher that usual, so I'm guessing transparency had something to do with that.
Mom and Dad are anxiously awaiting the arrival of their first scope (Nexstar 11, some first scope, jeez) and wanted to get some observing in ahead of its arrival. So we took a look at the show pieces that were visible last night.
Jupiter: Seeing was great even with it low down in the murk. We were able make out multiple bands, but we missed the occultation of Io. Even so, I got plenty of "Cools" and "Oh Wows".
Next I panned over to M42, Mom has been watching Orion all winter (plenty of time to do that sitting in a truck) and wanted to see the nebula. It was steady enough to make out the "E" component in the Trapezium and with a broadband LPR filter the nebula stood out brightly. I never get tired of this one.
After that, I lined up the Beehive in the finder scope to show them a nice open cluster. Of all the things we looked at last night I think the clusters impressed the most. Guess we're gonna have a couple of cluster hunters on our hands.
Next we took a look at the Leo triplet (I was able to make out the NGC for the first time from my backyard) and M51. I kind of impressed myself last night with the triplet, I lined up on 73 Leonis and moved east to where I thought they should be...looked in the eyepiece...and BAM, there they were first try. I guess practice does make perfect.
While the detail on the faint fuzzies was a little lacking because of light pollution, they still impressed. After that we stepped away from the scope and did some bare eyeball observing.
It was fun to take a tour of the sky with people that are truly interested in (understatement) learning the sky. Although I am new to perusing myself, I was able to point out a bunch of cool stuff, Orion, Leo, Gemini, Cancer, Taurus, Cassiopeia, Corvus, Serpens, Hercules, Corona Borealis, Ursa Major/Minor and more. I kind of surprised myself.
All in all, I think we had more fun just looking with bare naked eyeballs. Almost forgot, we also caught the ISS and HST passes. A good night, great company, what a great hobby.