Wed. MB report:
by Marek Cichanski
First of all, apologies to James for not responding to his tentative OI for Thursday. Would have liked to have gone, but I was busy after work and couldn't check my email until today (Friday).
Although Wednesday wasn't the best night for DSOs due to the bright moon, it was still a lot of fun! It was a pretty light turnout - James Turley, myself, and Allen Adler. Allen (Alan?) was imaging the moon with his Nikon Coolpix camera. It was a neat eyepiece projection setup, and he has a clever system that allows him to take lots of pictures in a short period of time.
James and I started with lunar observing, which was a lot of fun. We're both owners of new Orion XT10 dobs, and so far we're really digging these scopes. I've found the collimation to be pretty simple with the laser collimator, and the views have been great. First time I've ever had this kind of aperture. Lunar observation at high power is a little tricky without some sort of tracking motors, but it's still pretty nice.
A number of features near Copernicus were looking nice - Copernicus itself, of course, as well as Tobias Mayer A, which was right on the terminator and had an amazingly bright rim. Near the crater Birt we had nice views of both the Straight Wall and Rima Birt. Rima Gay-Lussac was showing up nicely, too, as was a small dome whose name escapes me at the moment. Mons la Hire was casting nice shadows across the Imbrium plains. Clavius was very well illuminated, and we had fun using the new Virtual Moon Atlas program to look at a Lunar Orbiter image of it, followed by attempts to find craterlets that we'd seen in the photo.
Although we couldn't see a whole lot in the way of DSOs, we managed to tag a few good ones. It was kind of amazing how dim M13 and M22 looked, but it's always fun to look at them nonetheless. We each managed to look at various opens and globs, such as M6, M7, the "false comet" area, the three Messiers near the bottom of the teapot, and two NGC globs near the stinger of Scorpius.
Sometime after midnight, on a lark, I noticed on my laptop that Neptune and Uranus were up. After a little work with the Telrad, a low-power eyepiece, and Starry Night Pro, I managed to see them both. It was a big thrill for me, having never seen them before. They're low enough that one can't see much, just barely tell that they're planets. Still, it was pretty neat. I guess that their current position along the ecliptic makes them the solar system equivalent of Omega Cent - visible, yes, but really best seen from the southern hemisphere.
James pulled out the TermiNagler and the OIII filter and showed me the Veil. Another fun first for me.
Although we could see fog in the distance, it stayed remarkably warm, dry, and dew-free at MB until we left at about 1:30. An all-around fun night, moon and all!