First-time visitor to Coe 10/6/07

by Elisabeth Oppenheimer

I started the night checking out double stars and then moved on to chasing down new Messier objects in my 4.5" dob (M2, M17, M18, M23, M25, M28, M30, M39, M54, M56, M69, M70, a questionable M74, M77, M103; failure on M72, M73, and M75). And I completed my planet list with Mars, though it wasn't showing any features. The planet list is easier without Pluto. It was amazing how washed out the south and west sky were by the end of the night, but it was still a night that would have had east coast people, who have clouds all year long, out in droves.

Everyone was very generous about showing off views in a number of scopes and eyepieces. My favorites were the dim Stephen's quintet in Mark Wagner's scope, the very rich NGC 7789 in James Turley's XT10 (I think), and lots of objects in Marek's 18" Obsession. With the Obsession, we tried out bino-viewers on M37 and a globular cluster (M2 or M15)—the bino-viewers did more for M2/M15 than M37. Marek also explained, and showed me, the spectral absorption and emission lines of Vega and the Wolf-Rayet star in the Crescent Nebula. Then we compared different eyepieces on the Double Cluster, and I was surprised by how large a field of view we could get with that much aperture.

Also, I got a chance to listen in on Mark's lessons to the camper—all very interesting, especially the discussion of how to see structure in M31. And hooray for Heather for bringing cookies.

…finally, I hope that those of you who were still there when I left speak to me again someday. I had my car's headlights turned off, per normal, non-star-party-disrupting procedure, and I have no idea what button I pressed to make my car decide that many bright lights should come on and not go off. It's never happened before, and I'll be spending some time with the car and the owner's manual to make it never happens again. I'm sorry, again.

Clear skies, though really, Californians have it so good,
Elisabeth