by Matthew Marcus
The Goddess of Love was looking pretty anorectic - a very thin crescent, and not nearly as bright as last week. Inferior conjunction must be close. The moon was in my favorite phase, a crescent thin enough to show Earthshine and not overpower the sky, but thick enough to let me see lots of features.
One of the people (sorry - forgot name) had a prediction of an Iridium flare (mag 0), followed by an ISS pass, followed by another Iridium flare (mag -5), all in 10 minutes, from 2249 to 2259. That's when the clouds started to roll in. We missed the first flare and saw about 3 seconds of the ISS pass, but did see the brighter flare. At two other times, we saw a bright satellite (say, Saturn-bright) pass S-N.
By midnight, we were socked in and two people had packed it in, leaving Robert English and myself. He made the sacrefice and left, leaving me alone. I waited until 1AM, with no sign of clearing, then left myself. By 0130, I saw clear sky over 101! I knew that would happen!
In between all of that, I did manage to get some observing done. The comet was naked-eye as a slightly fuzzy star, sorta like M42. Binox showed quite a nice tail. The telescopic view was essentially the same as last week's, with the two tails and stellar core.
Jupiter showed a hint of detail in the belts, and I missed seeing one of the moons come out from behind. One minute there were three moons, an hour later there were four.
Robert has an 18" which he'd extensively reconfigured. We poked around in Virgo with this, naturally getting the start of Markarian's chain. That remains my favorite galaxy field.
For my own observing, I only managed to log one new object, 4307 in Virgo. This is a mag 12 edge-on, quite big. It was tough to detect, especially as my scope was starting to dew. It got easier after I put on the dew shield and the dew came off.
Oh, well, the gods got me one!
Posted on sf-bay-tac May 23, 2004 14:26:43 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.1 Jul 12, 2004 20:13:12 PT