by Richard Navarrete
If you have Excel or some program that can read .xls format files, you can find my CalStar observing list at:
http://members.aol.com/richardn22/calstar2001.xls
At some point I hope to list my observing highlights. Out of 70 observations over 2 nights, I marked 10 as favorites.
Oh heck, here they are...
Polarissima Borealis was pretty cool mostly because it is the closest galaxy to the pole star. It is a bit dim, but easily seen in my 16" dob. Mark Wagner and I discovered that it is mis-plotted in TheSky software. Took a while to figure that out.
I managed to glimpse the small galaxy IC 1296 which is in the same eyepiece field view of M57. It was a very tough observation and need major averted vision. I could not hold it steady in any case.
Finally tracked down NGC 6946 and the open cluster 8939 in Cepheus. This pair is a real gem from a dark sky site. Needed the 35 panoptic to fit them both in the same field.
NGC 7008, a planetary in Cygnus was vedry nice. Large mottled ring, brighter at one end. The central star is easily visible.
A few open clusters caught my eye (quit laughing!) 457 the E.T. cluster in Casseopeia has lots of bright stars. 559 was small and condensed with many members. There was a nice arc of dim stars in this one. 654 has an interesting irregular shape with a mag 7.3 star in the field.
NGC 613 in Scultor was also pretty nice. Big and bright. This one might make a good CCD target.
IC 5146 was on my target list - the Cocoon - (Drat! Left that out of my Excel spreadsheet) was another nice target. It's fairly bright and large.
Also observed my first Hickson , number 93 with NGC 7550 as the star. Most of these were very faint. I had a hard time with a couple of these. There were 5 in all. CGCG 454-015 and NGC 7558 were the toughest. I just took my time, pumped up the mag a bit to a 9 Nagler. A print out I had done with a photo helped a lot.
Well, that's about it. A very productive two nights!