Fall Observing At Fremont Peak, SW Parking Lot, Sept. 24, 2005

by Peter Natscher

Jamie and I had a wonderful 4 hours of observing up at the SW Parking Lot last night. We shared many observations together and had a great time! I arrived by 6 pm, set up my 10" Mak-Cass telescope and immediately enjoyed views of blazing half-planet phase Venus, and farther west a much fainter ghostly-appearing Jupiter awash in a dusk sky. Jupiter is almost at conjunction with the sun and was positioned very low to the S.W. At sunset (6:55 pm), I was surprised to have spotted it naked-eye being only 4 degrees above the S.W. Horizon and between some horizon clouds. By the time Jamie arrived, we gazed at the dusk-colored cirrus passing us by, mainly to the S. and east. This continued thought dusk and by darkness the clouds were mostly gone exposing the passing summer triangle of constellations and the new fall-time skies. The cloudiness still remained to the S. and E. We were right on the border between passing cloudiness (W. to E.) and the clear skies overhead and to the N. The weather conditions last night at the Peak was: temp. a cool 57°F, calm, and dry with no dew. The sky was fairly bright with haze and the seeing was poor at the lower sky elevations but much better approaching overhead.

I had my 10" Mak-Cass up and running and Jamie had his 11" Dob. My memorable deep sky observations were the shared views we had of two distant and faint globular clusters in Aquila: Palomar 11 and the more challenging NGC 6749. Pal 11 appeared as a few foreground stars on top of an elongated haze, easy to find. NGC 6749 was visible as a small faint circular haze with averted vision and more difficult to find. The larger and brighter globular NGC 6760 two degrees to the S.E. was helpful in finding 6749.

Since the seeing looked pretty good through my 10" Mak-Cass using high power, I chanced a look at 71 Pegasi which was located near the zenith at the time. It's a 6.1/5.6 attractive yellow-colored double with a tight separation of 0.52 arc-sec. It was easily split at 500X and more so at 780X.

By 11pm, Mars was high enough to appear well enough to enjoy seeing the Syrtis Major and Hellas features located at 280° CM. I was bino-viewing at 463X for this. The seeing was in and out with fair detail showing of the Martian surface. There was a nice tiny S. polar cap at the edge of the S. limb and a beautiful bluish atmospheric haze stretching from the E. (morning side) limb and continuing over the N. pole. Northward pointing Syrtis Major showed finer intermittent detail along its edges during better seeing. Mars still has 3 arc-sec to grow in size.

We packed up by 1:30 am to the sounds of a family of hooting owls, a sparkling Pleiades, and the golden light of a last quarter moon. Fall is here at last.

Posted on sf-bay-tac Sep 25, 2005 17:31:02 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Mar 12, 2006 16:19:36 PT