by Gregg Blandin
Last night at Shingletown was the best observing night of the year for me although it doesn't have much competition.
I arrived at the site just after 7 P.M., about five minutes ahead of Shneor. Later on Jim Ster arrived.
The conditions were very dry with a light breeze and although it was fairly warm when we got there, the temperature dropped quickly. It's unusual for me to not have enough warm clothes, but I wasn't expecting a low of 40 degrees with occasional wind chill! Early into the evening it became obvious that it was going to be an excellent night. The transparency was around 8-9 out of 10 and the seeing would vary between 6-8 depending on the wind.
We got started by viewing some galaxy groups in Leo. Shneor lead the way with three trios in Leo (now say that fast 3 times!) One of them was M65, M66 and NGC 3628 but I got side tracked with an encoder setup problem before I could see them all. My problem turned out to be a minus sign where the should have been a plus sign on the encoder settings. I lost about a half an hour, but more than made up for it later, once the system starting working.
Once I resolved that, I followed suit with some exploration in Leo, picking the easy stuff first: M65,M66, NGC3628, and M95. Then a couple of nice trios (possibly observed by Shneor) NGC3187, NGC3190, and NGC3193 as well as M105, NGC3384 and NGC3389 a group which offers a nice variety with lots of detail visible.
NGC3860 was easy, but it's 4 other 15-16 mag group members (MCG3-30-92, CGCG97-113, and CGCG97-114) were small and equal sized smudges, only visble with averted vision. Minutes later they were gone with wind which has nothing to do with the movie.
The faint galaxies continued to elude my view, with the fairly steady light breeze.
I moved around a bit, M51 and M101 had awesome spiral arm detail a similar view to last week's at B.C., and M101 was interesting with Shnoer's H-beta filter. The quasar in Ursa Major was visible, but I couldn't split it. If you were willing to wait, the eyes and central star were visble in the Owl Nebula. M106 had quite a bit of detail and M108 showed varying intensity throughout the center, very similar to M82. I've never seen that level of detail there. The Sombrero looked the a sunrise coming through a layer of clouds with a very distinct and well separated dark lane.
Jim showed us an excellent wide field view of the Veil nebula in his 85mm. (I think that's the correct size). It's quite interesting to put the whole thing together in one piece. I viewed it later in my scope, seeing a level of detail I'd never seen before, especially the area north of 52 Cygni which looked like a irredescant thin walled tube. M13 was naked eye with more or less direct vision and looked even better in the telescope along with M92 and all the usual summer stuff. We had a great view of the swan in Jim's 31 Nagler and the nebulousity seemed to trail off forever in the wide field view.
I viewed quite a variety of NGC planetaries in Cygnus: NGC6833, NGC7026, NGC7027, NGC7048, NGC6894, NGC7008, NGC6881, NGC6826 and NGC6884. This is an excellent tour of Planetaries that I would recommend to anyone who likes them.
That's all for now.