OR Toro Park 20 January

by Jamie Dillon

Our Scout troop had their big annual January campout with training and planning and electing, this past weekend. I'd signed up to help serve dinner Saturday night (the only time in the year when the adults cook for the boys). Then went, oh good Jamie, New Moon Saturday. It's decently dark there, so I decided to just take the scope along. This is a county park on the slopes of Mt Toro, just south of Salinas. Now at Coyote the weekend before, I'd mentioned it to Denis Lefebvre, the other Salinan TACo, just as a courtesy. He took me up on it. So with Felix and Denis' new Orion XT10, and his Nexstar, we had 3 scopes set up.

Kids kept coming back. I had my last customers around midnight. And the adults were fascinated as well. This troop has seen Felix on outings 3 times now, and our ST90 several other times; they don't get tired of stargazing.

Felix is a Celestron 11" f/4.5 Dobs with optics made by Discovery Telescopes. Was using a 22 Pan, 16mm UO Koenig, 10mm and 6mm Radians. No filtration that night.

When most of the Scouts were in their tents, I went and chased open clusters in Monoceros. There's a whole set of 'em logged in DeepMap, so that made for a fun night. What finally dawned on me after midnight was the sense of looking out across our Orion Arm of the galaxy, finding young stars still in the groups they formed in. The winter Milky Way thru there is gorgeous anyway.

Saturn got good too, after 11. First good view I've had yet this time around. Cassini, bands on the disk, and Titan with Dione, Rhea and Tethys.

A favorite among those OC's was ngc 2301, a pretty chain in the finder, and a lovely bright shapely cluster in the eyepiece. Classic Milky Way OC, a bright wedge with interesting arms radiating in 3 directions. Another interesting one was 2324, a dense packed oval south of a wide pretty double star. Was dynamite in the 10mm at 126x. Easy 100 stars in the packed carpet, ca 12' long. It's listed as 9500 ly away, distant for an OC. Now the Double Cluster and Trumpler 1 in Cassiopeia are at similar distances, and in the next arm out, the Perseus Arm. Wondering if 2324 could be too. It's huge in any case at that distance.

Got an interesting RN, another one in Monoceros, ngc 2245, east of the Christmas Tree Cluster. It flared off the central star, like a short fanned-out comet tail, flaring to the SW.

Finished up with M3, that dense mondo globular in CVn. But first went down to Puppis to visit ngc 2477, a really amazing open cluster. Lovely and dense and enticing in binocs. At 126x, it was dense, rich and complex, laced with strands of stars.

Been out enough this winter, but this was the first night for getting a collection of new objects since 21 October. 11 new ones, a raging orgy.

More of this,
DDK

Observing Reports	Observing Sites	GSSP 2010, July 10 - 14 Frosty Acres Ranch Adin, CA OMG! Its full of stars. Golden State Star Party	Join Mailing List	Mailing List Archives
Current Observing Intents Click here for more details.