PSPR (Public Star Party Report) Sat 7 Aug 2004

by Matthew Marcus

While the imagers were enjoying sub-second seeing at FP [re: Richard Crisp's note], we at Coyote also had good seeing. I got a split of that extremely close double in Delphinus, the one joining the 'head' to the 'body'. The Airy disk was elongated and had a black band across it, which did not happen when looking at one of the other comparably-bright stars in the diamond asterism.

Anyway, the night was shirtsleeve and windless past moonrise. Dew only formed at about moonrise. Unlike the previous month, we actually got some public, maybe even half as many as we had telescopes. The usual area was unavailable due to a SCA event at which the rangers did a birds-of-prey demo, which I would have liked to have seen. The ranger who did this came over to tell us that they had advertised our event. I don't recall seeing anyone in period costume so I don't know if any of the SCAdians actually came. Still, it was nice of the rangers to advertise. However, there did seem to be a communications problem between rangers, as the one who stood by the gate did not know that this was a public night.

We had the usual great crowd of observers, with the usual assortment of scopes. Since it was a public night, I looked at little besides eye-candy. With the good seeing, the globs and the Double Cluster showed to great advantage. The sky seemed bright to me, so faint objects weren't really possible. For instance, the Veil barely showed without a filter, though an OIII popped it right out. Several times, I got to demonstrate how the same object looked in a small refractor and a C8 or my neighbor's C11 (sorry, I forget your name! I'm bad that way!).

Transparency was good enough, though, to make the Sagittarius eye-candy objects come out well. I found M17 more often by accident than on purpose. M8 showed a hint of color. 7027, a small but bright PN in Cygnus, showed up electric-green in powers up to 400x. This is a good object for bright skies as its surface brightness is very high. It should be on any list of 'moon-resistant' or 'city' objects.

Uranus and Neptune continue to be well-placed. The good seeing made Uranus quite obviously non-stellar, with a sharp-edged disk.

BTW, Richard, was that streak across your FP image of M8/M20 a meteor or satellite? I saw plenty of both, including a couple of satellites through the eyepiece and a Venus-bright meteor which might have been an early Perseid.

The Big Bright Thing came up over the hill to announce last call. I saw the dark side pop up first and was able to put my scope on it before it got swamped by the bright half. After that, I put the red filter on it and enjoyed the view for a while. Finally, I grabbed the last DSO of the night, the Pleiades, a hand away from the Moon but still worth a look.

In all, a very pleasant night, even if the public attendance wasn't huge..

Posted on sf-bay-tac Aug 08, 2004 16:09:34 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Jan 05, 2005 22:22:30 PT