TSP 2005 OR: First Night

by Bill Drelling

Last might turned out to be a very good night of observing. The clouds I spoke of in my first e-mail disappeared shortly after nightfall and didn´t return until 3 AM or so. I spent the first part of the evening observing on my friends´ 14.5" StarMaster and 17.5" Discovery Truss tubes. The images were nothing less then spectacular. Omega Centauri was especially noteworthy. With Nagler´s 82 degree FOV the glob was simply stunning. Granularity could be seen even deep into the core with clear variations in the magnitudes of the core stars. Somecolor could also be seen, but it was difficult to discern much of it.

M51 was at the zenith. Wow. With the clear skies, low humity, and a large aperature it gave the best views I´ve seen yet. The spiral arms showed good structure and as we cranked up the magnification the constrast between the background sky and arms started to bringout the subtle features and variations in arm width. I´ll be taking a 1.5 hour and 3.0 hour image of it using Fuji Provia 400 later this week.

The antennae (sp?) galaxy looked good even in an 8" reflector. Jupiter also gave us a pleasent surprise in the StarMaster. We caught the transit. As we watched the shadow move along the border between a dark and light belt (not sure the names of the belts) we saw the mooncasting the shadow move off of the planet´s disk. That was a first for me. In addition, the detail visible in the belts was interesting to see.

One thing that didn´tlook as nice as expected was the Inkspot. The other night from the top of Davis Mountain my friend and I saw it in out William Op`tics ZenithStar 80mm refractors. Last night, however, it was unremarkable in an 18 discovery. That might have been because we were looking at it early in the evening sortly after the clouds disappeared--so the transparency wasn´t quite as good as it was later that night.

As for my little 8" SCT, things stilllooked remarkably better than they did either in Louisiana or at Fremont Peak. After onserving with the StarMaster and Discovery scopes, I drift aligned my SCT and did the Meade "Easy Align" procedure. Things went very well as I took the Autostar guided tour named "Tonight´s Best." It enabled me to spend a leisurely hour observing a host of different objects throughout the skies. It was a blast. After that I broke out the STV I bought before leaving LA (and have not used yet due to the weather in SFB and my schedule). Well, it wouldn´t calibrate. Bummer. I´ve been talking up the problem with folks out here and have a few tricks that I will try tonight. More later.

Posted on sf-bay-tac May 02, 2005 16:01:54 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Sep 20, 2005 11:37:26 PT