How was the seeing last night?

by Rich Neuschaefer, Bruce Jensen, James Adams, Michelle Stone

Rich Neuschaefer

Last night I was doing volunteer "work" at Lick. Mars looked quite good when it was relatively high in the sky but you could still see the edges of the disk wiggle quite a bit. How was the seeing at the other sites last night?

Bruce Jensen

Lake Sonoma - wobbly edges until well after 11 PM. Then, I don't know if it was the elevation of the planet, improvement of seeing, or both, but around 11:45 or so it started holding magnification quite well up to over 300x. After midnight it was solid more than 75 percent of the time.

I used a stacked 17% moon and 80A filter with a 7mm Nagler (290x) for good, detailed views on the 18". Dang, that baby is bright!

James Adams

The La Honda Star Party was a success last night, thanks to friendly TACos and PAStros who brought scopes to share with an avid crowd of locals and a few hardy travelers.

Seeing was decent early on, dark enough to see dark lanes in the Milky Way; some minor large-cell turbulence until about 11 O'clock when it got REALLY dark and the atmosphere settled down. Views of Mars were quite good as it got higher. At 2 AM much detail was visible in the surface markings, and it was still shirtsleeve weather.

Another Star Party is planned for September 20.

Michelle Stone

We had one of the best nights I've ever seen here at Plettstone last night. I was getting mag 15 galaxies easily in the 15" F5 scope. M33 showed structure like I have never seen before in its arms. The star clouds in the galaxy had a three dimensional affect. All of the prominent hydrogen regions were clearly visible. It wasn't long before most of us were visiting as many Messiers as we could find. It was a treat to see such detail in familiar objects. M74 showed clear spiral arms and dust lanes. It's never appeared much more than a blob in any instrument I have looked through. All of the globulars were resolvable right to the core. This was true in all the big aperature scopes here. We even spent time looking a the globs well south of Sagitarius and they were quite spectacular even being so down in the muck.

I could go on and on, but I've got lots to do to get ready for OSP.

Posted on sf-bay-tac Aug 24, 2003 09:19:12 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.4 Mar 28, 2006 20:40:09 PT [an error occurred while processing this directive]