Last night at BC

by Brian Zehring

Conditions were very good last night at BC. I will not mention the names of the other observers who were there without their permission for fear of their immediate inceration for being on private property. I can say that one of their names rhymes with dob and he has two or three of those suckers, the other one goes by the nickname of a very red planet and well the last one is Jim Ster. We were also joined by about 20 people from the Sierra College astronomy department around 7:30. When we first saw their bus we thought it was it was a paddy-wagon coming to haul us all away, telescopes and all.

Seeing was excellent even with the high humidity and the temperature hovered around 35 degrees making it relatively comfortable. I looked at many things including the blue snowball (looked green to me), ngc 700, 704 and surrounding ugc's, the helix, the blinking planetary, the oyster (ngc1502?), the skull (ngc246) and much,much more. I even got my first glimpse of the horsehead nebula with an h-beta and my new 17mm Nagler. I spent some time looking for a little known galaxy PGC2544 or Andromeda IV that I first attempted a couple months ago. It is very close to the Andromeda galaxy and was once thought to be a satellite, but now it seems it lies many millions of light years beyond M31. I can't find a picture of the thing, it doesn't even show up on the Sky Survey and I have no idea about a magnitude for it. I can easily locate the field and was able to see a 16.5 magnitude star very near to it, but still no sign. We had a good six hours of observing including an awesome shuttle/ISS pass, a very good night all and all. Sorry my report sucks, I am still learning.