by Stacy Jo McDermott
So imagine my delight when I got off my 2nd job around 10 PM last night and saw, amazingly enough, how clear and steady the skies were in Pacifica! Yep I was tired. Yep, I was fighting a cold. But maybe, as long as I got to bed by midnight, I could hunt for my elusive M48, an open cluster in Hydra (but closer to Monocerus)...oh the possibility of finding it and finishing, nay, accomplishing the completion of my first Astronomical League observing certificate - the Binocular Messier Observing award!
Having finished my nightly "get home from work" post flight check (TIC), I gathered my S&T, my red beam flashlight, popped on a hat, put on the fuzzy slippers and trekked through the kitchen onto the back patio. Oh yes, da sky is wonderful! Oh yes, da stars are bright! (They were really poppin' last night). Oh yes, let's get down to bizness.
Having looked and studied my StarAtlas 2000 on a number of cloudy/rainy nights, M48 in particular, I felt confident that I would find it - it might be faint, it might take a while, but I would find it, bag it, log it and relish it. Well, apparently I was doing something correctly because I was able to zone in on the general area nekked eye, did a few checks between the atlas and the sky, and then proceeded to hunt. Five minutes later, BAM! M48. Looking like a coy OC, as if it were saying, "been waiting for you to look me up". I found it faint (duh - I was using binoculars and reminded myself of such), ovoid, but at the same time, I can tell that this would be fun to observe through my telescope. The starfield matched - so it was a match.
After a couple intense weeks at work, it was so, so, so nice to get out and find what I've been looking for - not to mention that even though I was out maybe twenty minutes (very tired little astronomer) it probably was the best 20 minutes observing I've had in quite a while.
Next goal - finishing my Honorary Messiers!
Posted on sf-bay-tac Thu Jan 22 09:06:24 2004 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.0 Sun Jan 25 08:36:26 2004 PT