by Richard Crisp
Last Sat night while the rest of the gang was at Lassen, Bill F. Jim F and I were all at Montebello. I managed to get a good view of Uranus with my CM1400 such that I could see a greenish disk. No features to see even if the seeing was good enough (it was OK viewing, but not "good"), as it is Uranus, but the edges of the planet were sharp and the greenish color was there. I was using a 17mm Nagler with the CM1400 for a total magnification of about 232x.
Neptune was much dimmer. I did see it but not as well as Uranus.
Tonight (7/24) at Montebello, we had a larger gang, James Turley, Phil Terzian, Jim Feldhouse and Kevin Schuerman [I think that was the correct family name, Kevin, please correct me if I was mistaken], my friend Jim Nomura and Dottie (didn't catch the last name) and the seeing was no where as good as on Sat. Uranus was fuzzy, ill defined in the same telescope/eyepiece. I didn't attempt Neptune because Uranus looked so bad.
All in all last Sat at Montebello was pretty good by comparison from a seeing perspective
Tonight we did all have a lot of fun with various DSOs including m8, m20, m16, m17, M51, M57, M27, M92, and a bunch of NGC galaxies in the Virgo and Canis V. area that I don't remember the numbers for, but James Turley and Jim Feldhouse knows as they were suggesting them. There were a lot of A/B comparisons between the various scopes out there ranging from a Ranger to my CM1400, with a C11 and a Tak 128 and a nice Intes Micro 7" Newt Mak belonging to Kevin. Filters were swapped around a bit and most agreed the OIII worked better on the diffuse nebulae than the UHC filters. Kevin theorized the reason was the narrower bandwidth of it made the background skies darker. I agree that the explanation sounded logical and it was a certainty that the background was much darker with the OIII Lumicon filter.
The NGC galaxies (one was 4449 I believe) were pretty faint, but we could make out detail on the mag 9.2 range ones in the CM1400. James Turley chose a group of five galaxies that I believe were in Canis V. and he said the same group of five were spotted at Lassen. I also viewed the "Ink Spot" and that was interesting. I believe that was my first dark nebula I've viewed. One tip I picked up tonight was how good the books "The Night Sky" are. I heard they are on sale at Orion so I need to pick up a set. Nice books and they have a lof of coverage of the NGC objects, something of which I am not too familiar at this stage.
One unexpected delight was the coyote in the parking lot, or at least he sounded like he was in the parking lot as he was so close. I tried to have a peek at him with my 2nd Gen NV device, but could never see him.
Jim Nomura is new to the star party scene and he had never been to Montebello. He remarked on the way home, that he had a dandy time and was pleased to get to see diffuse nebula where some detail could be seen. Neither he nor I can see much optically from our CCD imaging stations in our respective backyards. Jim has a CM1400 for the record and is a whiz at making CI700 mounts usable for imaging applications. He also recently got a wazoo FLI camera using the SITE chip. Nice camera. Too bad neither of us are portable from an imaging perspective. Someday for me!
I'm pretty tired now, but maybe some of the others out at Montebello would care to add a bit to this when they get the chance. All in all it was another fun evening with the TACos at Montebello. I'm getting hooked on this and have now packed the "observatory" as Turley called it, enough times that I can unload and setup in a half hour and teardown and re-load the car in about the same time. Last time it was an hour setup, so the good old learning curve works for Astro Gear as well as semiconductors.... rdc