by Dan Wright
Clear skies, not a hint of dew, surprisingly warm for January, but breezy with some unsteady seeing.
Too breezy for Pete to image, so he took to placing eyepieces in his home built 16" F4.5 Newtonian mounted on his AP900. First time I'd ever seen photons through that scope. He showed an impressive Cat's Eye, even if the breeze was bumping it around a little. He also showed the best Saturn of the night.
Marek was in fine form, and we also had Sarah E. and Brandon with Sarah's XT10. Conversation topics included the Lord of Rings and its film adaptations, the Harry Potter world and its ties to astronomy, good authors in general, and humorous captions on girl's T-shirts.
See how easy it is to find M41 in binoculars? Stare at Sirius, then drop about two fields-of-view and move right about a half. Lands in both your retinas and looks big. At school star parties, I often aim my main scope at M41, then walk down the line of people waiting for the scope and give them a preview of M41 in binos. Children and grandmas alike can successfully find it, which adds to their appreciation when they see it in the main scope.
While in Canis Major, Marek reminded us to have a gander at the "winter albireo", h3945. I remembered it fondly from winters past. It looked fine in Marek's ED80 with binoviewers and in Sarah's XT10 too. Congratulations to Steve Gottlieb for listing and labelling it on DeepMap 600 (I hear other maps and software may include these two stars, but without label or special mention). A google hit I found says h3945 is an optical or "line-of-sight" double (instead of a multiple star system), with the yellow star 6250 ly away and 30,500 times more luminous than our sun, and the blue star only 250 ly away.
At a leisurely pace I also checked out M52, the Blue Snowball, M33 Whirlpool, the Double Cluster, clusters in Auriga, and Orion and Saturn. Packed up and left at 10:00 and got home at a reasonable hour. Not the least bit groggy at work today. Ready for more winter observing!
-- From Dan