Conditions from Fiddletown

by Steve Gottlieb

We had a nice group at Fiddletown (Dennis Beckley and friend, Jim Ster (w/30-inch Starmaster), Alvin Huey, Shneor Sherman. Over 120 inches of aperture between the six of us. Clear, good transparency, no wind, pretty mild temps. Too bad, though, the moisture-laden atmosphere and poor seeing couldn't support the aperture. I had to stay at 100-160x all evening – any higher and the stars started to look like golf-balls.

It was a pretty poor night for hunting small galaxies in clusters (hard to distinguish from faint stars) and open clusters look pretty bad in the roiling atmosphere. So, I spent some time with large, dim planetaries of the Abell variety, Jones 1, etc which only required low power and an OIII filter. The seeing improved a bit by the time the moon was preparing to rise and we had a nice view of M42 in Shneor's custom 22-inch w/binoviewer as well as Comet Machholz (C/2004 Q2) in my 18-inch Starmaster. The comet (currently in Lepus) is sporting a broad tail and was easy to pick up in my 10x30 Canon IS binoculars. Not naked eye but pretty bright at roughly mag 7-7.5.

Posted on sf-bay-tac Nov 07, 2004 13:32:02 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Jan 21, 2005 20:02:21 PT