Coyote Sat 10 April 2004

by Matthew Marcus

As a few people noted, the weather wasn't very good for faint stuff. The seeing was mediocre too, and a few campers came in with lights blazing, though it wasn't as bad at the north end where I was. Thus, we had all the ingredients for a social night, which is what we had. A whole bunch of The Regulars were there, including Rashad, who for some reason wasn't at Plettstone. Stacy and James Turley shared their gourmet munchies, which were much appreciated.

On checking my books, I realized that there were a whole bunch of Virgo galaxies listed in NSOG which I haven't seen, even though they're plenty bright enough. Therefore, I had hoped to start on those, but that wasn't happening.

I spent some time looking for that supernova, and found the host galaxies. At the time I asked Rashad about it, he hadn't found the SN to his satisfaction. I wish I'd gotten a look when he did find it. That pair was my sole logged object for the night. The rest of the time was spent chasing suckerholes, looking at eye candy, and showing planets to people. Even in crummy seeing, Jupiter and Saturn, and even Venus are big winners for people who haven't seen them before, so my time was well-spent.

There was a student of Marek's there, so Turley and I alternated showing her examples of various classes of objects: M3 for globs, the Leo Trio and the M84/M86 start of Markarian's chain for galaxies, M35, M44 and the Coma cluster for OCs, the Eskimo for PNs and M42 for ENs. It was a fun little challenge figuring out what the best example of each class would be in the area of sky left open by the clouds.

As previously noted, the fog held off for a while as if in preparation, then invaded with a rush. Green lasers and floodlights revealed that it was only ~20' thick, but that was enough!

Posted on sf-bay-tac Apr 11, 2004 13:43:37 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.1 Jul 10, 2004 16:32:31 PT