by Matthew Marcus
It sure was! I was out with a couple of the die-hard imagers, including Ivor. The reason I picked Coe was that a friend of mine wanted to join me after a party in S SJ. He showed up at around sundown on his motorcycle, with a Meade ETX GOTO (4" Mak, I forget the model #) strapped on. He'd never used it, so it was an adventure. It started promisingly enough, with the scope putting Venus halfway out of the field of a 32mm Erfle EP (mine - the longest the scope came with was a 26mm Plossl) after a 2-star alignment. However, we couldn't find anything after that. The tiny finder is one of those with too little aperture for its magnification so it darkens the sky - not good for getting fuzzies. Thus, he enjoyed views through my C8 and Ranger. I showed him many of the standard eye-candy objects such as the more spectacular M's in Sgr and Sco, Epsilon Lyrae, Albereio, M51, the Leo Trio, the SW end of Markarian's chain (the 'smiley face'), the Veil, etc. He really enjoyed it, so I think he might spend the effort to figure out how to make the scope work. Worse comes to worse, he could polar align it, turn off the motors, and use it as an EQ mount. We couldn't judge the optics because of the seeing. He must have been there till midnight, then left amid a hail of cautions about safe riding and not slamming into deer and pigs.
The seeing stunk even though the stars didn't twinkle much. This apparent paradox was due to the speed of the scintillation. The stars appeared as shimmering fuzzballs, not as boiling blobs. Epsilon Lyrae showed elongation of each pair but no clean split. The transparency wasn't spectacular either. This was about the third observing night in a row for me with crappy seeing.
It's a good thing they wetted down the parking lot to prepare for that Search-and-Rescue drill because the wind would have made a Martian-level dust-storm otherwise. As it was, when the wind kicked up to ~40kts, plumes of dust rose from the lot. By that time, I'd long retired the Ranger to keep it from blowing over. The Tuthill mount on the C8 held fast with no sign that it wanted to tip over.
What with the eye-candy program and the wind, I only logged 1 object, 6712 in Scutum, an 8th-mag unresolved GC.
I left at 2:50, not quite the last out as I usually am, but only because Ivor's stuff took a while to pack.
Oh, well, at least I had the excuse to 'pig out' on eye candy!