by Richard Ozer
After hearing about how everyone was washed out Saturday night, I run the risk of being accused of a late April fools joke when I say that I had an excellent night of observing.
Saturday was society night for the Mount Diablo Astro Society and I had made the commitment to be there regardless of weather, just in case someone showed up and need the combo to get out.
As it turned out, all of the cloud-crud was just below the peak of Mt. Diablo and by 7:00, we had a decent sky with the fog just a few hundred feet below the peak. Transparency was medium and because of the fog, it was darker than usual.
I was there with about a dozen other observers, along with a couple of new TACos. There were a pair of 8" Meade cassegrain scopes, my 10" DOB, a handfull of refractors, a brand new (first light) 15" Obsession, a home-brew 15" DOB and its 20" cousin.
It was coooold early on; but with little wind. As the night progressed, it warmed up, and at midnight reached the mid 50's causing an amazing amount of dew (I'm talking puddles). The very mountain was sweating!
However, that gave us four hours of decent viewing. I was going after 10-11 magnitude galaxies in Ursa Major. I found fourteen of them in fairly short order (comments are next to the ones that were notable in a 10" scope):
| NGC 4051 | an easy star hop and a bright spiral. |
| NGC 5322 | |
| NGC 2681 | |
| NGC 3198 | |
| NGC 3941 | a bright small galaxy, interesting |
| NGC 2985 | near M81 and M82, easy to find star field |
| NGC 3631 | |
| NGC 3726 | |
| NGC 3938 | |
| NGC 3893 | this is a nice one. Alot of structure is visible at high magnification (275x) |
| NGC 4088 | |
| NGC 3898 | |
| NGC 3998 | this is an elliptical galaxy that is part of a nice grouping. It's right next to NGC 3990 |
| NGC 4036 | alot of structure visible at high magnification for such a tiny object. |
With thoughts of a warm summer, we also were happy to catch views of M3 and M13. Comet IZ, early on in the evening, was still quite bright and visible with binoculars. It's tail is getting harder to see, but it's still an amazing sight.