by Rob Hawley
I also spent the first hour the first two nights on the LMC. The LMC (and SMC) is easily visible, but not bright like the Milky Way. It looks to me a little bit like a thin regular cloud that is lit by ground light.
It is rather overwhelming when you first see it magnified. The view is a little like Sagittarius, but even more dense with objects. I brought the Uranometria with me so I had good detailed charts. The first two nights I logged several of the big objects that were on my pre-trip list. There were many more that could be easily observed. The final night I was going to systematically record everything I saw. Unfortunately my take on the last night was different than Steve's. There was a low cloudbank or haze at sunset on the last night. I was not as happy with the views as I was on the first two nights (night 3 was a loss). So I vowed to come back to the LMC when I had a better view and moved onto to objects on my list that were higher in the sky.
Eta Carina is another area to spend time on. There are a lot of clusters and nebula there besides the bright Keyhole (Eta Carina) nebula.
BTW Jupiter transited nearly overhead. We observed a shadow transit one of the nights. On the last night we had an extremely clear view with the excellent seeing. We encouraged the staff and the owners of the lodge to come by and have a look through the scopes. That was very well received. S&T sent a couple of Orion Starblasters for trip participants that did not have scopes. Some of the staff were interested and started using them. S&T decided to leave one with the lodge.
My more complete OR will be in the April Ephemeris.
Posted on sf-bay-tac Thu Mar 4 18:21:42 2004 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.0 Wed Jul 7 09:09:47 2004 PT