Fiddletown

by Dennis Beckley

I was up at Fiddletown last night with Darrell Lee. It was very pleasant - warm temperatures and slight breeze. The external light pollution wasn't that bad. There was one string of intermittent lights very low in the bushes to the NW that was easily screen out by raising the the hatchback cover of my station wagon. The other light up on the hill to the NE is easily blocked by the trees. Really no problems and all the lights were off by midnight.

I spent a lot of time looking at eyecandy stuff with Darrell and his XT10. He'd never been there before so this was a lot of fun for both of us. I logged 2 more objects from Steve's list (I like to spend a lot of time on each object with different eyepieces) and then we spent some time looking at the moon and left for home about 3:00. Log entries below:

Observing Log Entries for IC 1296

Date	2004 September 6 22:20	Observer	Dennis Beckley	Location	Fiddletown	Instrument	Obsession 18 inch f5.15 PC, Tom O Platform
Object Type	Galaxy	Apparent Position	RA. 18h53m29.5s Dec. +3304'26" (Lyr)	Magnitude	15.5	Object Altitude	71 degrees
Conditions	Excellent seeing (4/5). Very Clear (6/7) MW/M31 direct vision, 9 stars visible in the Little Dipper			Eyepieces	TeleVue Nagler 9mm, 264x TeleVue Radian 6mm, 396x TeleVue Nagler 3.5mm, 679x
Seen only with averted vision, next to a 13.5 star within a small parallelogram just west and slightly north of the ring nebula (M57) (PA 305, distance 4'); the galaxy is a faint small smudge elongated in E-W direction. No distinguishing features could be seen and the galaxy could only intermittently be seen at 300 to 679x with averted vision; proximity of star just to the west and the brightness and large size of the Ring nebula itself make seeing this galaxy a challenge. This was on a night when I could just intermittently see the central star in the Ring at 1200 x.

Observing Log Entries for Minkowski's Footprint (M 1-92)

Date	2004 September 6 23:01	Observer	Dennis Beckley	Location	Fiddletown	Instrument	Obsession 18 inch f5.15 PC, Tom O Platform
Object Type	Planetary Nebula	Apparent Position	RA. 19h36m30.4s Dec. +2933'34" (Cyg)	Magnitude	11.0	Object Altitude	70 degrees
Conditions	Good seeing (3/5) Very Clear (6/7) MW/M31 direct vision, 9 stars visible in the Little Dipper			Eyepieces	TeleVue Panoptic 22mm, 108x TeleVue Nagler 9mm, 264x TeleVue Radian 6mm, 396xTeleVue 3.5 Nagler type 6, 679x	Filter	OIII
Protoplanetary nebula (similar to M 2-9- “Minkowski’s Butterfly) - found adjacent to a 10m star (PA 87, distance 29") At medium power it is seen with direct vision as a mag 11 "fuzzy" star. At higher power it is more oblong than perfectly round. I couldn't see the central star and there was no obvious enhancement with a OIII filter. I spent a lot of time confirming the location but it was not that difficult using the excellent SkyTools 2 finder charts.

Posted on tac-sac Sep 07, 2004 11:49:00 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Jan 09, 2005 09:07:09 PT