by Richard Ozer
After reading about everyone's dark(ish) sky observing, I'm compelled to share the great fun I had right up the hill at Chabot last night.
It was society night for the East Bay Astronomical Society, and about a half dozen of us got exclusive use of Chabot's telescopes; the 8" Alvin Clark, the 20" Brashier, and the new 36" cassegrain (designed by Kevin Medlock and Dick Vable(sp?) among others).
Present were Conrad Jung who, that very same day, had his Andy Warhol 15 minutes in the Oakland Tribune Business Section; his picture in a full page spread about astronomy software; Carter Roberts, EAS president, Don Saito, and a few others who dropped by.
The transparency last night really sucked, at least until 10:00 or so. However, the seeing was pretty decent.
Carter Roberts put his bino-viewers on the 20" refractor and turned it on Saturn. Because he needs a barlow to get the proper focus with the bino-viewers, we had the magnification at close to 500x. The view was tremendous; there's nothing quite like having both eyes open while looking at Saturn. I could easily imagine I was a stowaway on Cassini! The Encke division popped in and out, and there was no sign of the Encke Gap; however, the view was quite crisp and the dark shadow of Saturn cast upon its rings was as dramatic as always.
The 8" was turned on Jupiter, with it's red spot coming into plain view at about 9:30. We had also turned the 8" on Venus, which is currently at a near perfect 50% phase. We were wondering if anyone had ever seen dark banding on Venus's cloud cover? If so, let me know...
This was my first real opportunity to check out the 36" cassegrain. This scope is built like a tank. It rests on a gigantic fork mount and is housed under a large roll top observatory next to the domes. This thing slews fast. I was amazed at how quickly and accurately the guide system was able to move all that mass.
Conrad had it turned on M46, the open cluster in Puppis. What we were
looking at, however, was NGC2438, a planetary nebula in the same line of
sight. Here's a shot of it taken at Mt. Wilson a few years back.
http://tie.jpl.nasa.gov/cgino/ngc2438.htm, and an even nicer shot taken by
TAC's Ivor Barker
http://www.makos.darkhorizons.org/Astronomy/DSO's/ngc2438.htm. Seeing it
naked eye was a blast. This scope is designed mainly for Astro-Photography
(considering its light polluted location), but it was certainly alot of fun
to have visual observing time with so much aperture.
Posted on sf-bay-tac Mon Mar 15 22:09:16 2004 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.0 Wed Jul 7 23:18:23 2004 PT