Fiddletown, 1/29/05

by Shneor Sherman

I arrived about 5:15. Randy Muller and Jake Burkart were already there. I picked out a spot shielded from the lights of the house on the hill, and proceeded to set up (for the first time ever, I put my ring on incorrectly and had to redo it - it's never worth rushing!).

It was quite damp all night, and my windshield frosted over, as it was also cold. During the night, I had to clean my secondary several times using my 12-vold hair dryer, but had little trouble with eyepieces.

The transparency was below average, and seeing was average.

Comet Macholtz was quite spectaculaqr in my 22" at about 80x using my 30mm WidescanII+Paracorr, with a small bright not-quite-circular nucleus and a large halo and faint wedge-shaped tail. It was very nice later on using my Denikmeier Binoviewer with 30mm Rini eyepieces. As it was about 7 p.m. By now, and I knew that the Fornax Cluster was culminating, I treined my telescope on it. I counted 12 galaxies visible in the neighborhood (it's a very coa4rrse coluster, and it's necessary to pan around to see them all - similar to Markarian's Chain in Virgo). They werre much dimmer than the last time I viewed them, in December. Still, they were impressive, and I shared the nice view. Next was M42, stunning as usual, and exhibiting apparent three-dimansionality in my binoviewer. Saturn was high in the sky, and was just specctacular in the binoviewer, both with the Rinis and also using my 18mm Widescans. Quite a few moons were visible, I saw at leqat 6; Randy saw 7. I also viewed M! 31/31/110, M81/82 and M65/66 and a couple of other galaxies in Leo.

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Posted on tac-sac Jan 31, 2005 07:43:15 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Jan 31, 2005 17:46:52 PT