by Andrew Pierce
Conditions were better than expected last night at Montebello. Marek and I were the only observers. There was some cirrus about, but I caught a good window between 9 and 10:45 or so when it didn't interfere with the southern objects I was looking at, except briefly.
My Teleport showed its stuff, as I was set up, collimated and DSC aligned in about 10 mins and packed up at the end in less than 5 mins. When its 45 degrees you don't want to linger. There was no wind, so observing was actually pretty comfortable.
Highlights for me were mostly in Sculptor. I got my first look ever at galaxies NGC 7507, 55, and 134. The latter two are well worth checking out. 134 is adjacent to a diamond shaped asterism which makes for a striking field. Also got my first glimpse of NGC 288, the globular cluster near NGC 253. Its kind of sparse for a globular and lacks much central concentration. Sort of looks like the richest, most uniform OC you could imagine. I could not make out two low surface brightness galaxies, NGC 7513 and NGC 300. NGC 253 rewards prolonged viewing with averted vision and NGC 55 was also worth lingering over. So I knocked off four from my DeepMap list.
Ended with eye candy, as usual, in this case NGC 7789 and M42. M1 wasn't quite high enough to look good at MB by 11:00 when I left.