Last night at BC

by Jim Ster

Yeah, it was a good night at BC all right. Right up to the point where I set up my scopes and nothing worked right. I was already hustling to get set up in time to track the ISS/Shuttle pass. When everything goes well I can have all of my equipment up and running in 45 minutes. As it turned out, I only had 43 minutes. The omission of a simple minus sign when entering longitude and latitude caused me to miss an opportunity to track the ISS/Shuttle pass in my LX200. My software thought I was somewhere in eastern Asia rather than at BC. I was still able to track them manually though. The Shuttle was flying upside down and was incredibly bright due to the sun's reflection off its white tiles on its top surfaces. I was able to make out the delta shape of the wings as well as tell the cargo bay doors were open. Way cool.

5 minutes later my laptop died and upon inspection, noticed that my SCT corrector plate was already beginning to dew up. I then put my damp electronic stuff away and resorted to using my LX200's internal computer for goto. The "backup" system worked perfectly and even though the SCT was fogged, my piggybacked TV-85 took me on a Messier survey which only took an hour to complete due to the lack of many winter Messier's. I didn't keep track of which ones I saw, but I'd guess there were 4 of them below the horizon for every one I was able to see and a lot of them were near the horizon in the muck. The best view of the evening was of M110, which was almost at zenith and looked incredibly bright. It was better than nothing.

Brian shared some nice views of some great PN's and the guy who will remain nameless but who's name rhymes with Dob gave me a great view of an Abel Cluster which I forgot the designation of. There were at least 5 faint galaxies visible in the FOV. The transparency was great but the seeing was off due to the moisture.

The humidity rose to over 90% by 8:00, so I decided to make it a short night and called it quits.