A brief OR

by Bill Drelling

Alberio (spelling? Albireo?) looked great. The colors of the two stars and the contrast made for a nice sight. Several members of the public looked at it as well and were excited that they could easily see the differences between the double stars.

M3 didn't look too bad all things considered, but from Chabot's plaza area you are looking at it as it sits in the south/west over the city of Oakland. Having seen it under very dark skies I was not exactly impressed with the view, but still it was visible. What did surprise me was the public's reaction to M3. They were amazed and kept asking me to point it out to them in the sky--thinking they could see it naked eye. That was a bit entertaining to hear. When I'd tell them a little bit about it (my only real knowledge of it came from reading the info displayed on the LX200's hand-paddle) they were flabbergasted. The thought that it was about 35,000 light years away blew their minds. Several of them had those little digital cameras, so I told them that they could set it up on a tripod and use their flash to photograph the cluster, then come back in about 70,000 years then the light from the flash returns and open the shutter. They'd pause for about 5-10 seconds, then start laughing.

I mo ved the scope over to M13 a bit later in the evening. It was at the zenith, so it looked far better than M3. Surprisingly you could actually see some granularity in the edges of the cluster despite the light pollution and the skyglow from the moon.

Later I slewed to M57 (yes, I use goto) and took a peek at it. It stood out reasonably well despite the background sky. The public didn't seem too interested in it, though, because it is so small and dim.

We looked at Jupiter and the Moon as well. The kids loved the Moon. Lots of ooo's and ahh's from them.

Overall it was a great night. Several of us topped it off with an O-Dark-Thirty run to Juanitas in Alameda for oversized burritos. After that I went home quite exhausted. Ended up converting all those burrito and refried bean carbs into body fat as I slept. Life is good!

The only disappointment for the night was that I couldn't find the planetary that I "discovered." Yes, the one from the last post I made that started the recent flame war. I decided to look to see if I could spot anything at that location in Cygnus. Unfortunately, it wasn't there. I even looked with an OIII filter. Bummer. There goes my dreams of fame, fortune, and glory.

At least the burrito was good.

Bill