Observing Report: Dinosaur Point - 12/10/01

by Albert Highe

Denny W., Phil T., and Jeff B. and I made it out to Dino Monday night. After setting up our scopes, and enjoying the traditional barbecue, we anticipated a great night. The skies were wonderfully clear and blue, promising excellent transparency. Despite the relatively strong winds in the Bay Area, Dino was mostly calm with a few occasional light breezes.

By sunset, the temperature dropped to 51°F, with the relative humidity at 54%.

Observing Highlights

Scope	12.5" f/5 ultralight
Eyepieces	14mm Radian (113X) and 9mm Nagler (176X).

It grew quite dark and the transparency proved to be excellent. I used the Perseus galaxy cluster (Abell 426) as my reference. This is a very rich galaxy cluster with a lot of "bright" galaxies. I always enjoy viewing the brightest four, which lie at the corners of a parallelogram.

NGC1275 (mag 11.9, size 3.2'X2.3')
NGC1272 (11.8, 2.2'X2.0')
NGC1278 (12.4, 1.4'X1.1')
NGC1273 (13.2, 1.1'X1.1')

It's a rather poor night when I can't see all of the above. However, in addition to this parallelogram, I could see at least five other galaxies in the same f.o.v. of my 9mm Nagler. Although the views weren't as good as at Calstar, I was able to see faint galaxies such as NGC1274 (14.1, 0.5'X0.4').

Phil and I looked at comet C/2000 WM1 (LINEAR) several times during the night. It had a very small and very bright core with an almost circular extended bright halo. The tail was quite a bit fainter. If I took a quick look, it resembled a bright face-on galaxy. However, by looking closely, I could see the tail extend out beyond the field of my 14mm eyepiece. My primary interest was to observe its motion relative to the background stars. It is moving fast! Over the course of three hours, I estimated that it moved about 0.5°.

I didn't arrive with an observing list. I mostly re-acquainted myself with old friends I hadn't seen in a while. By 9PM, the temperature dropped to the mid 40's with RH in the high 70's. We never had any dew. By this time, Saturn and Jupiter were high enough, but seeing was rather poor for planetary observing.

Shortly after 9PM, some high, thin crud moved in. Three of us packed up, already having enjoyed a few great hours. Jeff stayed later, peeking through sucker holes.