by Marek Cichanski
There were four of us at MB last night - myself, Bob Hess, Dan Wright, and Dan's father, who was visiting from out of town. It was a lot of fun meeting Dan's father, as we were able to talk geology, and I learned a lot about geothermal energy.
There was a lot of cloud at sunset, and it persisted for a couple of hours, but I'd say that it was pretty well clear by about 9pm. The wind was mostly out of the north, plenty chilly, and there seemed to me to be some sign of the wind turning from more NNW to more NE-ish. It appeared that the promised high pressure was finally building. Cool beans.
We did manage to look at a few more things than just the Moon, Saturn, and double stars. Mostly standard eye candy, of course, like M42, the Pleiades, the Double Cluster, etc... I also recall seeing M50 and M79 through Dan's scope, too.
I had my ED80 on a CG-5 mount, atop a homemade wooden tripod, and it was reasonably stable in the wind. Bob had a somewhat similar rig, a TV-85 on a Vixen GP, and Dan had his trusty LX200 with Denk binoviewer.
I was only able to give my AstroCards a short workout, but I was well pleased. The thing I liked about the cards was the small size of the 'lighter'. (James Turley had graciously given me his AstroCard lighter some months before.) It's lightweight, it's easy to hold in one hand, it's so much less hassle than holding a large atlas or a big map. Even easier to hold than a small atlas. And it's got the easiest 'field rotation' of any atlas out there, hands down! Of course, there's the matter of having to swap the cards out, but I didn't mind that so much. I will be curious to use the cards some more. I did a quick comparison between the AstroCards, the Millenium Star Atlas, and the Herschel 2500 list, and the cards go remarkably deep. I don't know how practical it would be to see everything on the cards - you might need to bring in MSA or other atlases to be sure of your I.D.s of faint galaxies - but if you did, you'd have seen the entire H2500 and more, I think.
Another new gadget that I used was a new 1.25" variable polarizing filter from Lumicon. I hadn't used a variable polarizer before, priding myself on taking my moonlight straight. But it was pretty neat to be able to dim down the Moon in order to preserve night vision for other objects. One impressive feature of this new filter was how dark it will go. I also have an Orion 1.25" variable polarizer, and the Lumicon filter gets a lot darker. If you want to make the Moon look about as bright as a Herschel 400-II object, this sucker'll do it.
I was pleased at how many DSOs still looked decent, even under 1Q moon. My views of M41 and M50 were quite nice, as were a number of NGC open clusters in Monoceros. It almost seemed to me that the stray, glaring moonlight in the corner of one's eye was a bigger deal than the added sky brightness. Most interesting of all was the result of my Sky Quality Meter. I held my hand so as to shade it from direct moonlight, while hopefully not obscuring a significant amount of the sky. I did this around 11pm, when the moon was reasonably low in the west, and so I think that the meter was getting a pretty standard view of the upper 80 degrees of sky. It read about 19.3 to 19.6. The last moonless night at MB was about 19.75. So, 1Q moon makes things brighter, but not as much as I might have expected.
Seeing was pretty good. Four stars in the Trapezium were very steady in the ED80 at 120x. Had hints of a fifth. Had a nice Saturn, although the wind was a definite issue at high magnification. Dan had his LX200 on the Moon at high power with a binoviewer, and it was awesome, at least when the still moments in beween gusts came.
We were all gone by about 11pm. I was tempted to stay past moonset, but it was getting pretty windy. 41 F when I left. All in all, a very worthwhile night, I thought.
Posted on sf-bay-tac Feb 05, 2006 09:29:05 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Feb 27, 2006 19:41:16 PT