by Robert Sheaffer
I went to the HVAG star part at Grant Ranch last night. There were about a half-dozen scopes or cameras set up.
It was hazy down in San Jose, but as soon as you got up on the mountain a ways it was sharp and clear. The winter Milky Way glimmered overhead, and M36 and M38 were easy naked-eye objects. However, atmospheric turbulence was so bad that there was no point in even trying to look at the planets. It was a night for low-power, deep-sky observing.
I started with the Crab Nebula, which in the Celestron 11" GPS using a 38mm wide-angle eyepiece was large and featurless. A UHC filter on a 22mm Panoptic only made it so dark that little was seen. Some structure was visible in a 17mm wide-angle.
M35 was brilliant and beautiful, too large to fit into the field of any EP. The "second cluster" (NGC 2158) was easily seen like a haze or smudge on the edge of this one. Magnification resolves it.
Other objects in addition to the "usual suspects" were M78 in Orion, a little round blob of nebulosity, containing two fairly bright stars. No detail was seen.
M79, globular in Lepus. Pretty nice for an object so far south. Moderately large, with a bright core. Resolved fairly well at medium power.
NGC 40, planetary in Cepheus, mag. 12. I see what looks like a star surrounded by a circular haze. Very little detail in the nebula. The central star is easily seen.
NGC 2169, Open Cluster in Orion. A nice, geometrically arranged collection of bright stars. According to Kepple & Sanner, the stars spell out the number "37". I like this one. NGC 1662 is another Open Cluster in Orion, but not as interesting.
However, the weather got quite cold and the dew was fierce. The dew-zappers had to work extra hard, and the eyepieces got fogged rather quickly.