Monte Bello Wednesday 19 April 2006

by Pentti Kanerva

Three of us had posted an intent to go to MB Wednesday night but three more scopes showed up by 9pm--apparently without intending to. I had kept an eye on approaching vapor on the NAVY satellite image and was prepared for a short shift. Turned out much better. Two strips of altocumulus did sail through before midnight but there was always good sky left to gaze and the rest of the night was clear with mild temperature and without wind, dew, nor mosquitos. A ranger came by soon after 8 to check that it was only us observers out there.

I set up in twilight and aligned to Polaris (so I thought), took a good look at the Orion Nebula and the Trapezium, and tracked down asteroid 9 Metis in Leo (10.3 mag) while waited for the sky to get dark. I was really after the faint Messiers of the Great Bear because they don't show up in my 5" Mak from Menlo Park, and after the M83 galaxy in Hydra that likes to lurk behind some trees. Was happy to find them all! While down south, saw also the M68 globular in Hydra and the Omega globular and the Peculiar Galaxy NGC 5128 in Centaurus; cannot resolve the globulars, and the galaxy is just another smudge.

Had very steady and clear views of Saturn and Jupiter and enjoyed watching Io disappear behind Jupiter.

Things were going so well that I dared galaxies of the Virgo cluster: M98, M99, M100, M85, and M61--all but M98 were a simple point-and-look--then run out of time. I left MB at 2am, with six of 110 left to do, all in down-town Virgo.

Lessons learned:

  1. When aligning an equatorial mount, it pays to align to the real Polaris. I had failed to account for its degree parallax compared to Menlo Park and noticed my error when Saturn kept on drifting in the North-South direction.

  2. When working between the zenith and the Polaris (in UMa), it pays to turn the star chart upside down. I had heck of a time matching the stars in the eyepiece to the ones on the 1.5-degree finder chart for M101 before turning the chart over.

Posted on sf-bay-tac Apr 21, 2006 13:58:12 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.4 Apr 23, 2006 08:18:35 PT

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