by Matthew Marcus
The weather was warm, with shorts&T-shirt practical most of the night. Sometime about 1AM it started to get chilly, but not very. There was almost no wind.
The first object for me was the sun, which showed a few spots. Next up was the moon (thin crescent) and Venus (half).
The Perseids were warming up, with lots of brilliant, mostly slow, white meteors. Many of these went along the Milky Way. Many left trails, some persisting for >10seconds. I felt that I don't need to come out Monday night - I already saw the show.
The seeing was fantastic. The stars in Epsilon Lyr were each surrounded by their own Airy disks in my C8. This emboldened me to try for Beta Delphini, an unequal pair with a 0.6-0.7" separation. Every so often, a moment of great seeing would come and the pair would be clearly split, with the dimmer star sitting on the brighter one's Airy ring. This sighting was confirmed by two observers, Robert Leyland and someone else (I forget who).
Given great seeing and no big planets, what do you go for? Globs and rich OCs. I therefore hit M13, M22, M28 and M11. All incredible. Later, I hit M15 in search of Pease 1 (the tiny PN in there). Robert got it in his scope as a 'star' which didn't dim as much when blinked with an O3 filter as others of nearly equal brightness. I didn't succeed in my scope.
I had coordinates for Uranus and Neptune from the August S&T, so I was able to get them pretty easily.
I followed Robert's plan of working in Aquila, logging the following objects:
| 6738 | Coarse OC in sort of an arrow shape |
|---|---|
| 6741 | Tiny PN (6"). Definitely needed the seeing. Used 417x. |
| 6751 | PN. Showed hints of structure in Robert's scope, not in mine. NSOG says it's annular. |
| 6773 | One of the non-existent "OC"s. A chance grouping of stars in the Milky way. Aquila's full of them. |
| 6814 | Aquila's only galaxy (for backyard scopes). |
I also failed to find several tiny PNs and a glob. I had already logged some other objects, so in the interests of time, I didn't go for them again.
At some point in the proceedings, Perseus rose high enough to make searching for Comet Hoenig worthwhile. Somebody posted a pointer to coordinates. I interpolated them and used them as a guide. It didn't appear right away in my scope when I set it on the coordinates I was using, so I used the Telrad to make a mental mark on the sky, panned my binox around the area and picked it up easily. I could then find it in the scope. It looked like a typical tailless comet, i.e. like a face-on spiral with arms not resolved and a stellar core.
Later, after much looking at eye candy, Aquila was sinking and I was getting tired of tiny PNs and nonexistent OCs, so I went over to Pisces and started working galaxies:
| 7541+7537 | A pair consisting of one which is quite elongated and easily seen (41) and a much fainter one (37). The latter is tabulated at 13m so I was pleased to have been able to detect it. It's position and orientation agreed with the sketch in NSOG, which I hadn't looked at before searching, so I believe I really saw it. |
|---|---|
| 7562 | Tiny and round. |
| 7785 | Ditto. |
| 467,470,474 | A nice group of three, with some nearby stars for pointers. 470 is bigger than the other two. |
| 520 | NSOG shows this as being actually two objects. In larger scopes, this shows as a cigar with a pronounced dark lane (the separation between the objects, presumably colliding galaxies). I didn't see the dark lane. I'd like to get a look in a bigger scope. |
| 676 | This is a round galaxy rated at 9.6m, but much harder to see than the mag implies. It's not big, but it does have a 10m star right in the middle. It therefore looks like an RN. It's easy to miss because you're looking for fuzzies, not stars. |
By now, it was getting on towards morning. Taurus was up and Orion partway up. I did resist the temptations of M42 and the Auriga OCs, but did yield to M1. However, I saved the best part of this feast of eye-candy for dessert - Saturn. Even though it was a little low, it showed Cassini very nicely, several moons, coloration on the planet, a color difference between the bright rings on either side of Cassini, and a hint of the Encke whatever-it-is.
I left at 5AM, tired but happy.