by Leonard Tramiel
Yesterday afternoon my son Alex and I went down to Dinosaur Pt to observe with the group. We got there right about sunset, no problem with the gate and marveled at the beautiful setting on the ride down from the crest to the reservoir.
After a short stroll to great the group Alex and I set up our scopes, two dobs, an Orion XT8 and an 14.5" f/5 ultralight and settled in for what turned out to be a really nice night.
Alex is learning his way around the sky for the first time and I'm seeing how much more is visible going from an 8 to a 12.5 inch aperture. Alex's new object list was Ms 35-38 and M1. He also gaped for a while at his favorite M45 and the ever popular M42. Then it was time for a nap.
I looked around the big dipper and saw lots of the objects that are so difficult with an equatorial fork (my old scope is a C8). First observations of M108, 109, 97, 63, 94 and the two brightest NGCs near M81,82 (NGC 3077 and 2976) were performed as well as views of old favorites. I had spent some time reading up on the Virgo cluster and set my sights on Markarian's chain but it was real low so I mooched some photons waiting for the sky to slowly change.
I started a 6 Com and scanned around until I found M 84 and 86 with two NGC galaxies making a rather distinctive face. One end of the chain. As Mark Wagner told me earlier, in that region you don't star hop, you galaxy hop. So a few hops and skips later I had spotted about a dozen galaxies. I spent some more time scanning around, saw some more galaxies. This area of the sky is wonderful!
We left a bit before 1 am. A great night. Thanks everyone.