OI at MB Last Night

by Nick Biunno

The Sring/Summer nights at MB are getting nice. Meifong and I arrived early to set up and then Meifong prepared a nice sunset dinner. Something I think we will be doing on a regular bases. As mentioned Jason showed up then Phil, then a whole bunch more. Several nice 10" dobs and one Teleport 14". We invited a friend to share some of the wonders of spring/summer sky.

Last Monday at MB, which we didn't OI, Meifong went on a globular cluster frenzy, Iost count after 15. At lease 8 of those were new M and NGC objects for us. Last night Meifong got out of control again this time on open clusters, after getting in a few galaxies also. The one I liked best was the Butterfly cluster M6 in Scorpius.

While Meifong was hopping from NE to SW, I was playing with the Mintron video CAM trying to take it the its signal-to-noise detection limit. Even though the seeing wasn't the best for this exercise I was able to detect some detail in the Owl Nebula M97 @ mag 9.9 and spiral galaxy M98 @ mag 10.1over what we were observing visually. As Jason mentioned, my intension was also to work in Virgo but I found out that it needs better planning and maps. Ended up taking video clips of M3 globular, Sunflower galaxy M63, and the "crayfish" nebula (that's what it looks like to me) M17 in Sagittarius.