Blue Ridge August 7-8

by Dennis Beckley

Last night Darrell Lee and I went observing at our new 1st quarter/3rd Quarter site about 35 miles north and west of Benicia. It's not as dark as Fiddletown but has the virtue of being only 45 minutes from our homes and all in all not a bad site (elevation around 2600 feet).

We were the only ones up there and the night was warm and balmy. Mosquitoes not too bad and the seeing was decent. We both brought our 10 inch Orion dobs and since Darrell had just recently bought his it was a good opportunity to put it through it's initial checkout at a reasonably dark site.

We initially observed the two comets in the west (K4 Linear and Q4 Neat) which are still realatively easy to see and the new supernova 2004 dj in NGC 2403. The supernova was easy to see and find (AAVSO chart is excellent). The galaxy itself wasn't much but it's fairly low. Spent the rest of the short night looking at various NGC and Messier eyecandy objects (The veil was almost at the zenith and fantastic with the OIII filter) and a frustrating attempt to find Comet H6 swan in Aquarius depite being in the right area.

Finished off the night looking at the 3rd quarter moon's terminator and racking up craters for my AL lunar list. Home by 3:00.

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Posted on tac-sac Aug 08, 2004 21:06:26 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Jan 06, 2005 22:27:28 PT