by Bill Chandler
(congratulations Bill!)
On my way home from work (4PM yesterday) the clouds were still thick. However, around 6pm, the sky looked VERY CLEAR from EDH and toward the east foothills (where Bill lives). He called me with the new his scope had just arrived and he wanted to try it out. OK! I showed up at Bill's around 8PM. His scope was already setup, but we needed to collimate and do some minor tweaking. With that finished, we began the evening looking at the crescent moon. Very nice. Atmospheric turbulence was very low (considering the moon's location in the low western horizon) so we could clearly make out the light side craters and the peaks along the terminator. In addition the 'dark side' could be easily seen with earth shine.
Very cool. :-)
Next we jumped over to Saturn. Considering it was much higher in the sky, one would've thought it too should look nice, however we discovered that his mirror was still cooling off because the image seemed a bit turbulent and trying to clearly see the Cassini division was difficult.
We then proceeded to M104, M81/82 and M65/66. While looking at these last pair of galaxies, it was fun to see NGC 3628 in the same FOV. :-)
Next we checked out M52 to see what a GLOB would look like. Very nice. We cranked the power to 175X to really bring out the star patterns, in this cluster. Again, very nice.
We finished the night with M51, Saturn and Jupiter.
Clouds rolled back in around 9:45. A short night, but very nice to share '1st light' with Bill's new DOB.
Cant' wait for tonight. :-)
Posted on tac-sac Apr 22, 2004 09:36:34 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.1 Jul 10, 2004 18:47:10 PT