premliminary OR for Saturday night, shallowsky first

by Jamie Dillon


Rashad Al-Mansour said,

No supplication before the finder scope altar for me though, all my scopes are trained.

This is the man who years ago said, "Starhopping gives me a headache."

Another longterm TACo, the Beastmaster, said about Jupiter ...

The great pale spot was almost dead center of the planet with it's four bright moons doing a little dance around the planet.

OK, this is strange. Kingsley, Wright and I were looking at it too. It right along the equator, so we were calling this thing a big white oval. The GRS is supposed to be in the SEB, not right midships. What we were looking at was definitely between the two equatorial bands. I thought I had you there, compa, just looked up the GRS transit times, and 2 am Sunday our time the GRS was at the meridian facing in our direction. Has it really changed latitude that much?

As to the comet, we spent a whole lot of time watching the B and C chunks in a variety of scopes. Interesting that the B chunk was so far away from piece C, over 5 degrees, from the Keystone over into Corona. Tony Hurtado found the G piece in his 18. He used the chart to get it dead center, and we could see a little point source, ca 12th magnitude, with haze around it. Turns out Kingsley found the R piece using Skyhound, in his 14.5. In my 11", only the B and C pieces were possible. They were beautiful, with broad fans on both their tails. I only saw one tail on piece C.

Over at Ranger Row, in Robert Armstrong's 20", the tail on the C chunk showed as half a degree long. Fancy.

This was from the Peak on 29 April. More to follow. It was a great night. Sweet dreams to all the TACos and TAQueritas.


Posted on sf-bay-tac May 01, 2006 23:43:27 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.4 May 04, 2006 21:13:53 PT

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