Coyote Lake 17 June

by Jamie Dillon

The night of 17 June, a whole gang of us showed up ad lib at Coyote. There was Coyote Lou, Queen of the Lurkers. Also Joe Bob, Lumps hissef, Ron Sherrill, Peter McKone, a guy Mike with a 10" Orion, and at least 4 other telescopes with their humans. Mars and Saturn were passing each other and Mercury was just above the trees.

Lou was using the new Pocket SkyAtlas, a real handy book. Pointed out some doubles in Lyra that I hadn't seen. Struve 525 is just above the line where the Ring is. Then also for the first time saw the Double Double's Double, which I understood is a set of two doubles that are optically close, not another quadruple system. I wrote down the numbers 2470 and 2474, and now have no idea what they mean, sorry.

T Lyrae is also highlighted in the Pocket SA. A carbon star, never seen it before, and it was impressive that night. Really red. One person taking a look said, "It's a ruby." He was right.

The other new highlight of the night was the Bug Nebula, ngc 6302. Interesting planetary, looks like a galaxy, very bright core with wings extending out, longer wing to the West. 6281 is a pretty open cluster that bounced into the finder, in that same neighborhood, demanding attention.

That night the sky was the darkest I'd seen at Coyote, somewhere around a 5.8 limiting magnitude. Seeing was decent. There was lots of conversation and less hard science, but fun all around.

Catching up on TAC paperwork!

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