TSP Day 5

by Darrell Lee

It started as another night of lousy weather. Clouds moved in at sunset and eventually we had three storm cells lined up to the north from west to east, coming our way. Everyone covered their gear and prepared for a spring Texas soaker. It arrived with a tremendous lightning and thunder display about 10 p.m. with rain beginning at 11:00 p.m., and was still going strong at 12:30 a.m.

I woke up early at 3:00. I thought about waking Len and Dennis, but they'd gone to bed later than me. I guessed that if there were 4 hours of observing time remaining, they'd want to get up, but they wouldn't want to get up for just 2 hours of observing. As it turns out, I was right. So I got in a couple of hours of viewing this morning, although everything was wet, and dewing conditions were bad. I didn't take the time to connect a Telrad heater, although I had a secondary heater running. Skies were gorgeous, with the Milky Way brilliant from Sagittarius to Cygnus.

I got my telescope observing list up to 20 of the 25 needed to earn a pin (I've already earned their binocular observing pin on Sunday night of TSP). I've relied mostly on go-to scopes to find my objects until TSP. They want you to star-hop to your objects for the observing pins, so I've been doing that. Many of the objects are easy, like M6, M7, the Lagoon Nebula, etc. Others are more difficult, like NGC 6572 (planetary nebula in Ophiuchus) and NGC 6523 (globular in Corona Australis). All were selected as southern sky highlights.

Some, like Omega Centauri, appeared on both binocular and telescope lists. Surprisingly, Centaurus A only appeared on the binocular list. I was a little surprised, since it's a galaxy. The telescope list had NGC 5286 and NGC 5460, globular and open clusters, respectively, in Centaurus.

Anyway, we're hoping for decent skies tonight.

Posted on sf-bay-tac May 06, 2005 09:58:17 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Sep 20, 2005 12:23:20 PT