by Peter Natscher
Arriving up at the Peak by 4 PM, I drove around to all the observing spots at the Peak to ascertain the windiness and see the area's new upgrades. The park service had made a few upgrades to the Coulter Area over this past winter. There's now a newly built dual pit bathroom nearby and totally new pavement throughout that's widened the Coulter Area parking for more observing set up space. Along with the lack of wind, I decided to set up at Coulter Area. Setting up behind the gate at FPOA would have placed me in a more windy and wet environment. With the stillness of the air at Coulter and no negative jet stream effects overhead, I realized by 8 PM that the 20" would have been the better choice of scope to bring.
By sunset at 7:30 PM, Jamie D., another threesome (who relocated from the SW parking lot because of the persistent wind there), two more observing couples at the edge of the Coulter camping sites, and I were all well protected from any wind the whole night. As I watched a beautiful one-day old thin crescent moon setting over the Pacific, I knew it was going to be a lot better night of observing than last week's. The worry some jet stream wasn't producing any bad seeing with my 10" Mak-Cass. My view of Saturn after sunset and again at 10 PM at 400X was very good. The Cassini division was visible all around, nice ball features with its widening shadow on the rings, and the fainter moon Enceladus consistently visible.
My 10" Mak-Cass was easily splitting 0.7 arc-sec doubles early on to gauge the seeing by and my transparency count was noted by spotting mag 6.3 stars in overhead Leo. Temperature was in the 40's and the RH in the 90's. By 9 PM, the dew was the big issue for us and so I had my Kendrick dew heaters running big timeand it payed off. The dew did inactivate the neighboring threesome's five scopes, so they packed it up and left by 11 pm. Jamie and I remained to enjoy the many springtime deep sky objects visible with our 10" and 11" scopes. I continued with my Herschel II observing project manually finding, logging, and sketching the many mag. 13 galaxies on the list in Gemini, Lynx, and Leo. They were all fairly easily to find and sketch with direct vision. 10" is an effective aperture to find mag. 13 faint fuzzy objects with. I would find them with my 11x70mm finder, center them in view with my 31mm Nagler at 120X, and then critically observe, log, and sketch them with a 12mm Nagler at 308X. It's taking me about 20 minutes on each object, a bit more time than I was required of me on the Herschel 400 list of brighter objects.
Posted on sf-bay-tac Apr 10, 2005 15:36:49 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Apr 10, 2005 20:14:47 PT